Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Prologue, 1 Concerning Hobbits
The Lord of the Rings: Part One, Fellowship of the Ring opens on page 1 not with lush scenery or snappy dialog, although plenty of this will come later, but with an approximately 7,500-word essay on the fictional world of Middle-earth. Fourth grade Abby found this authorial decision to be delightful, but readers unprepared for a short thesis might quietly place the book back on the shelf and step away. For the next few weeks, I will dive into the Prologue from the perspective of a historian, examining where events in the essay mirror those in the real world. Today’s post reflects on the authorial decisions of writing style for the overall Prologue, the origin of the text that Tolkien claims to translate, and the use of anthropology in the first section, “1 Concerning Hobbits”. The longest of the five sections, J.R.R. Tolkien details the physical traits and skills of the race; their evolution, migration, and colonization; and how their beliefs differ from other races in the world.
The first question to consider is, “Who is the author of this essay?” The easiest explanation would be Tolkien himself. In the real world, Tolkien drafted the essay with assistance from beta readers and editors before it was published in 1954. However, in the context of the fictional world, multiple writers may share authorship. The essay is written similarly to other articles by historians and anthropologists from Western Europe during the post-war period. The language is more subjective than modern anthropology texts, romanticizing Hobbit society and presenting its agrarian economy as similar to pre-industrial societies in Western Europe. Additionally, the author or authors reference material previously appearing in The Hobbit, which was written by Bilbo Baggins, a character notorious for lying.
The authorial decision to use subjective language and sources is unsurprising, as the field of anthropology was undergoing transformation at the time. The term “anthropology” had been devised as early as the mid-18th century and went hand-in-hand with the Age of Enlightenment, exploration, and European colonization. The study of people became a field of science. Philosopher Immanuel Kant took the first crack at defining the discipline when he wrote Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht [Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View] (1798) while firmly seated at his desk at the Albertus Universität in Germany. Kant spoke on the human condition with opinions of gender and race that have not always aged well, but his work was revolutionary in its quest to define “What is the human being?” I rephrase his question as “Who is treated as a person?” and will ask this frequently throughout my time with the book.
Tolkien was born as anthropology became its own field. In 1863, during the Victorian Era and while the United States was divided by the American Civil War, British scholars Richard Francis Burton and James Hunt founded the Anthropological Society in London. Burton was from Devon, England and referred to himself an orientalist, a scholar of the East. Burton was also a polyglot, so both he and biographers have made claims about the large number of languages he spoke, although the numbers are not confirmed. Burton did a lot of inadvisable and unethical things in the name of research, like disguising himself as a Muslim to visit Mecca. Not much different was his compatriot Hunt, a speech therapist with pro-slavery beliefs who thought Africans evolved from different ancestors than Europeans, a debunked theory known as polygenism. Even during his lifetime, Hunt was shunned in academia for his views. Together, these men started a precursor to what became the oldest extant anthropological organization in the world, as their society merged with Ethnological Society of London, forming the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI), in 1871.
It comes as no surprise that Burton and Hunt both had interests in language, as problematic as their interests often were. The Lord of the Rings demonstrates how the study of human history and human language often overlap. Anthropology and linguistics have long developed together, with the discipline of linguistic anthropology combining the two fields. The website Anthroholic describes how cultural changes impact language. Evolving attitudes towards race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and ability have led to new words to entering languages, while other words become outdated or taboo. While once used to degrade people deemed inferior to the dominant group, linguistic anthropology is now “used to address issues of social justice and inequality” by revealing how “ideologies around accents and dialects can lead to discrimination”.
Returning to the text, the Prologue opens by mentioning the Red Book of Westmarch, explaining that The Hobbit was “derived from the earlier chapters” (1). The essay does not yet explain what this book is, although it appears comparable to other lost and rediscovered texts. The complaint tablets sent to bronze merchant Ea-Nasir, who lived in the Babylonian city of Ur around 1750 BC, have become a favorite of ancient history meme culture and are recognized by Guinness World Records as the oldest known customer complaint. The tablets were acquired by the British Museum in 1953, the year before Fellowship was published, and now sit alongside countless other artifacts taken by the British Empire. As previously mentioned during my article on Tolkien’s Foreword, the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of sacred and secular writings by Jewish scribes. Since their discovery at the Qumran Caves in Israel was made known to the academic world in the 1940s and 50s, the documents have provided insight on the assembly of the biblical canon and daily life in the scribes’ community. A third well-known series of discoveries, which occurred throughout the 18th and 19th century, were the Herculaneum papyri, scrolls famously carbonized after the eruption of the Roman volcano Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Today, graduate students use modern technology to scan and decipher the ancient scrolls as part of the Vesuvius Challenge. The contents of the scrolls will likely be readable within the next few years.
The Prologue gives details on the current state of Hobbits, lamenting that they were “more numerous formerly than they are today” (1), suggesting that the population was extant but in decline during the 1950s. The Hobbits “love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favorite haunt”, implying a preference for farm life more sentimental than realistic. The essay later emphasizes their “close friendship with the earth” (2) preferably a managed piece of land turned into a Western style farm. Interspersed throughout are visual descriptions of Hobbits, which I will cover in detail in a future post. For now, it is most important to know that the Hobbits experienced “Wandering Days” (3), a nomadic people who “moved westward” to avoid trouble, whether traveling in small, independent bands or as official explorers with permission given by a king of men.
Perhaps the most interesting sentence in this section of the Prologue appeared on page 2: “Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves… But what exactly our relationship is can no longer be discovered.” Through this explanation, all four Races are implied to be humans or from the genus Homo. Hobbits have a more recent common ancestor to Men than Dwarves do, and even more recent than Elves. Interestingly, the only confirmed or canonical interracial relationships in The Hobbit were between Elves and Men. The entire population of Rivendell had both elvish and mannish ancestry including its leader, Elrond.
Determining genetic relatedness did not exist at the time of the book’s publication. The existence of DNA had only been known a year, after a discovery by a group of four researchers: chemist Rosalind Franklin, physicist Maurice Wilkins, zoologist James Watson, and physicist Francis Crick in 1953. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was not awarded until 1962 and then given only to the three men, as Franklin had already died. Past anthropologists estimated the relationships and movement of ancient people based on other disciplines such as etymology and archaeology. Theories behind human evolution relied on these techniques. As mentioned in my article on the Foreword, Pope Pius XII led the Catholic Church in the statement “Encyclical Humani Generis” in 1953, “the Church does not forbid that… research and discussions… take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution”, and the theory was finding mainstream acceptance by this time. However, to my knowledge, these theories had never before been applied to a fantasy context.
More standard for the time was the record of Hobbit migration, as the Prologue detailed the movement and implied colonization of different “breeds”, as the Hobbits were called. According to Etymonline, the modern term “ethnic group” arose in 1945, while “breed” referring to a group of people dates from the 1590s. The author may have considered Hobbits to be breeds rather than ethnic groups because their story is told in an ancient world, or because they were not truly people despite the implication of being genetically human. Throughout The Hobbit, Bilbo was derogatorily called a rabbit, bunny, or rat by the dwarves who he claimed to be his friends, and these animal-based references continued to be used in The Lord of the Rings. Using animal terminology to describe people has unfortunately not been limited to the fictional world, but sentiments on this were changing even before Tolkien published his work.
Human migration in literature had been a commended topic since the early 20th century. Dutch American researcher and children’s book author Hendrik Willem Van Loon published The Story of Mankind in 1921, which won the inaugural John Newbery Medal for best American children’s book of the year in 1922. My own discovery of a lost document involved this book, as I found a first edition stuck behind a shelf at the local library when I was in high school. Van Loon wrote more than fifty books on a wide range of subjects during his lifetime. He emphasized that humans are a changing and migrating species. He created early linguistic anthropology maps to show how words from ancient languages can be found in many modern languages, and how ancient people moved West to populate Europe and later colonize the Americas. While not all of his hypotheses are now considered correct, the errors were rooted in lack of information and research techniques rather than prejudice. Van Loon’s crucial question when creating his books was, “Did the person or event in question perform an act without which the entire history of civilization would have been different?”, and he removed storylines that did not meet the standard. This question can also be asked of the characters in The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien would have been familiar with two different instances of repeat human migration into an area. He spent most of his life in England, a country whose language is well-known for its international vocabulary. The British Isles are littered with the remains of past civilizations, not unlike the crumbling towers across Middle-earth. Archaeologists unearth remains from human ancestors. The Bretons and other Celtic people built stone monuments like Stonehenge and barrows to bury their dead. The Romans constructed Hadrian’s Wall, while the Anglo-Saxons arrived with Old English. The invasions of the Vikings introduced Norse to the language, and William the Conqueror led Normans, Franks, and Gauls in bringing Romance languages to the islands. The languages of Middle-earth are similarly layered, with several names for locations, groups of people, and even individuals.
Tolkien’s birthplace of South Africa may have served as another model for migration into the Shire. With multiple locations designated as part of the “Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site” by UNESCO, the country’s climate and biological diversity made it an ideal location both for early humans and repeat, agrarian-focused colonization even before the age of European exploration. Khoisan lived in the area for thousands of years before the Bantu Expansion, also called the Bantu Migration, between 2000 BC and AD 1000 when groups like the Zulu and Xhosa arrived in the area. Dutch merchants arrived via the Verenigde Oostindische Compangie (VOC) or the Dutch East India Company and later brought Dutch farming families to permanently work the land. British troops invaded at the end of the 18th century, pushing the Dutch inland. All agrarian intent was forgotten with the discovery of gold and diamonds in the 19th century, and the country became industrialized.
Much more information is stuffed into the first nine pages of the book and pertains to the differences between groups of Hobbits, two calendar systems, maps, architecture, and etymology. When describing and comparing, I will continue to use post-colonial theory to explain decisions made by the writer. Additionally, I will keep asking, “Who is the author of this essay?”, along with the rephrase of Immanuel Kant, “Who is treated as a person?”, and the question of Hendrik Willem Van Loon, “Did the person or event in question perform an act without which the entire history of civilization would have been different?” By laying a solid foundation through connecting the fiction events of Middle-earth to events of the real world, I can better navigate the famous ambiguity of Tolkien’s writing and make educated inferences based on prior knowledge.