Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Prologue, 2 Concerning Pipe-weed
Continuing my series on historical comparisons with The Lord of the Rings, I move on to “2 Concerning Pipe-weed”, the second section of the Prologue. Smoking is a nearly universal concept, with cultures around the real world and in fantasy cultivating and imbibing their own favorite herb. J.R.R. Tolkien was a known heavy smoker, rarely going anywhere without his pipe, and yet his writing shows that he understood the dark side to smoking. Tolkien may not have been aware of the more serious health risks to smoking at the time of the books’ publication; in fact, smoking in moderation was considered a normal, even healthy way of life. However, the most common plant species used for smoking — including tobacco, opium, cannabis, and coca — are linked to colonization, worker exploitation, and addiction. Big Pipe-weed in Middle-earth, much like Big Tobacco in the real world, is quietly pervasive throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings until the shocking final chapters of Part Three: The Return of the King.
“2 Concerning Pipe-weed” begins with a short note by an unnamed narrator, a 1950s anthropologist studying Hobbit culture. He foreshadows the ending of the series by informing the reader that “Meriadoc Brandybuck (later Master of Buckland)… and the tobacco of the Southfarthing play a part in the history that follows” (9). Not only does the reader learn that Meriadoc Brandybuck, called Merry for most of the main narrative, will survive the War of the Ring and become a powerful leader, but this plant that the author claims to be a strain of tobacco or Nicotiana is crucial to the narrative. The remainder of the section “quotes” Merry’s book, Herblore of the Shire. It details the history of “true pipe-weed”, first cultivated around Shire Reckoning 1070 by Tobold “Old Toby” Hornblower of Longbottom in the Southfarthing at a time when Isengrim Took the Second, the father of the warrior Bullroarer Took, was Thrain of the Shire. Merry complains that the people of Bree “claim, of course, to have done everything before the people of the Shire, whom they refer to as ‘colonists’” (9), although he admits that they are probably correct. This animosity between the two groups is not unlike the disparaging of peninsulares, people of Spanish ancestry born in the Americas, by the españoles born in Spain. In both cases, the two groups were genetically identical, differing only in place of birth.
Despite his complaints, Merry does appreciate The Prancing Pony in Bree, a tavern kept by the Butterbur family for generations and serving as pipe-weed central where Dwarves, Men working as rangers, and one Wizard took up “the art” of smoking. As for environmental impact, pipe-weed is an invasive species, as Merry writes “the weed itself is not native to our parts of the world, but came northward from the Anduin… originally brought over by the Men of Westernesse”, a group also knows as the Dúnedain. Some of their descendents, the Men of Gondor, call the plant sweet galenas and prefer its flowers. Merry closes out with one last brag: “Hobbits first put it into pipes. Not even the Wizards first thought of that before we did.” (10)
The passage reads not unlike narratives about other smoking plants grown by people in the real world. According to an archaeological discover in 2021, tobacco was cultivated in what is now the southwestern United States from 12,300 years ago, joining “coffee, tea, alcohol, opiates and many psychedelic plants and fungi [cultivated to] deliberately alter mental states in some way”. The plant was either smoked or kept in the mouth. Since then, tobacco has been cultivated into two distinct species: Nicotiana rustica or Sacred Tobacco, and Nicotiana tabacum for commercial cigarettes and other mass produced products. Sacred Tobacco is used in ceremonies or given as a thank-you gift, not smoked, and is rarely responsible for addiction.
Christopher Columbus was the first European to record the smoking of tobacco. On November 6, 1492, “The Spaniards upon their journey met with great multitudes of people, men and women with fire-brands in their hands and herbs to smoke after their custom.” (Kettel, 78). Later, Frey Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote in his Historia de las Indias [History of the Indies] “men always with a firebrand in their hands and certain herbs for smoking… These tubes they call by the name of tabacos… I knew many Spaniards in the island of Espanola who were addicted to the use of them” (78-79).
The Spaniards quickly spread the plant to Europe, where it received the name Nicotiana after Jean Nicot, the French ambassador to Portugal who first sent the plant to France. In 1604, King James VI of Scotland and I of England saw what smoking did to his people and wrote A Counterblaste to Tobacco, informing the public that the practice was “hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs”. While he was not wrong in the accusation, he included slurs against “wilde, godlesse, and slavish Indians” as another reason why the “superior” English should not smoke. Twenty years later, James retracted his counterblast to create a royal monopoly on tobacco under the pretense of aiding the colony of Virginia.
The introduction of tobacco did not stop in Europe, as the Portuguese brought the plant to Japan, and the Spanish brought it to the Ottoman Empire. Later, tobacco was brought to southeast Asia and Australia as a means to making colonized people dependent on smoking and easier to control. Back in the Americas, tobacco became an American cash crop. Indigenous people were driven from their ancestral homeland so European colonists could set up plantations, which began in the early 17th century. Tobacco reached its height in the southern United States during the late 17th through the 18th century. A shift in the economy decreased the number of European-born indentured servants and American-born bound apprentices with European ancestry while simultaneously increasing the trafficking of enslaved Africans. Millions of people, both free and enslaved, worked in inhumane conditions to provide the world with low cost tobacco.
Colonized people were not the only ones given tobacco products as a means of control. Military smoking culture began during World War I where Tolkien picked up the habit. The propagandistic “Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Tobacco Fund” with its poster saying, “Let us make every effort and see that they are never in want of either pipes or tobacco” taught the general public that the boys at war needed to smoke. General John J. Pershing, an American general during World War I, believed “Tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration”. Smoking was used to self-medicate when anti-anxiety medication did not exist, painkillers were limited, and even the best doctors had little understanding of mental health.
The first modern anti-smoking campaign was led by the Nazi party in Germany, where convoluted arguments compared the purity of Germany’s air to racial purity and blamed cigarette usage on interracial relationships. The first scientifically backed anti-smoking studies came out in 1948 by British doctor Richard Doll with a follow-up in 1950. Chemical manufacturing company Monsanto later paid this controversial physician to tell the public that Agent Orange, used by the United States as chemical warfare during the Vietnam War, did not cause cancer, when other doctors have since documented cancer and serious birth defects. For additional nails in the smoking coffin, The British Doctors Study came out in 1954 just as The Lord of the Rings was published, and the US Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health came out in 1964.
While smoking tobacco has greatly decreased in the 2020s, many modern American Indians feel pressured to smoke. “You’re an Indian, so you need to smoke tobacco… talk about putting a chokehold on an entire culture,” reported Sean Brown of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma in an article published by NPR 2021. The Sacred Tobacco of traditional ceremonies has become conflated with the commercialized strain along with pop cultural portrayals of American Indians. Perhaps a similar societal pressure affects the Hobbits, even if they do not contextualize the pressure as a modern person would.
Additionally, if the Hobbits really were smoking tobacco, as implied by the 1950s anthropologist narrator, Merry’s claim is problematic, as he is crediting European-coded Hobbit society with discovering a product cultivated by Indigenous Americans. However, the narrator is likely unreliable, as are many narrators in the works of Tolkien. Merry explained that “For ages folk in the Shire smoked various herbs, some fouler, some sweeter” (9), so the Hobbits smoking options have as wide a range as the real world and may not include tobacco at all. Detailing the history of other real world smoking products may provide clues for a more similar plant.
Opium, an extraction from poppies with the scientific name Papaver somniferum, has been used in the Mediterranean and northwestern Europe since the 6th century BC during the Neolithic Era. According to Michael J. Brownstein, an expert in the science and history of narcotics, priests, magicians, and warriors in Ancient Egypt used opium in rituals, while executioners in Ancient Greece and Rome mixed it with hemlock to put people to death, and opium reached Arabia, India, and China by the 8th century AD. Opium peaked in popularity during the 19th century with the American Civil War, where both militaries used opium products like laudanum and morphine as cigarettes were used in World War I, and addiction to the drug became widespread. Called “God’s Own Medicine” by Canadian doctor, “father of modern medicine”, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Hospital, and notorious prankster Sir William Osler, the topic of opium addiction became the subject of literary works. Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously composed “Kubla Khan” while under the influence, while Thomas De Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1822.
Opium took on a racial tinge as the drug became associated with “vice” in the Middle and Far East. China attempted to ban opium, but the British East India Company (EIC) was committed to selling the product, leading to not one but two Opium Wars during the mid-19th century. As I learned during my trip to Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site several years ago, smuggling opium into China was how the Delano family made their money, not unlike many prominent European and American merchant dynasties. Opium was widely banned throughout the world during the late 19th and early 20th century. In the early 2000s, Afghanistan was the leading producer of opium until the takeover by the Taliban in 2023. This greatly decreased the global drug trade, but farmers relying on opium crops have few other employment options.
Opium does not seem to be a likely candidate for pipe-weed, as the product is the head of a poppy plant, rather than a leaf. In contrast, coca leaves have been “used as a stimulant to reduce fatigue, hunger, high-altitude hypoxia, and thirst, and as a medicine and digestive” for over 8,000 years in South America. Plants in the genus Erythroxylum were called tupa coca by the Inca, whose royal families extensively used the plant to denote social status. Similarly, Merry could afford to extensively experiment with smoking because his father was Master of Buckland, the feudal lord of a small country.
Much like tobacco with the English, the Spanish tried to eradicate coca, then turned around to begin selling it. Other colonizing countries created coca plantations in tropical areas, including Java in the former Dutch East-Indies, now called Indonesia, and Formosa, a former colony of Japan now called Taiwan or Chinese Taipei. The cocaine alkaloid, which accounts for 0.5% to 1.0% of the leaf, was isolated in the 1860s and added to tonics through the early 20th century, finding its way into the original Coca Cola recipe and cocaine.
By 1961, the United Nations held the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs to ban the growing of coca leaf, along with the production of cocaine and heroin. This action was based on a brief visit by a UN official to Bolivia and Peru in 1949, along with the subsequent ECOSOC Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf report in 1950. Modern advocates argue that the ban was based on racist assumptions about Indigenous people in South America, and the content of cocaine alkaloid in a leaf is no different from a drink containing caffeine or alcohol. The Bolivian government has led the effort to decriminalize chewing coca leaf since 2009 with little success. However, target dates for coca leaf eradication have never been met. The plant continues to be a cash crop throughout South America.
While coca is a leaf much like tobacco, it is typically chewed, not smoked, unless it has undergone extensive processing into a paste or chemical extraction to become cocaine. Additionally, the plant is native to South America, returning to the original problem of a European-coded person claiming a discovery made by an Indigenous person. The next candidate is cannabis, also known pejoratively as marijuana. The 2019 article “Cannabis: The Fabric of Japan” by John Mitchell for The Japan Times detailed the Pre-Neolithic origins of hemp in Japan, where the plant was cultivated alongside rice and mulberry. The plant was brought to the islands up to 18,000 years ago from Ancient China, Korea, and India and used to make clothing. Current archaeological records are unclear as to whether Ancient Japanese people smoked. Daoists in Ancient Western China added cannabis to incense burners and inhaled the smoke, while Hindus in India continue to drink bhang, a medicine made of cannabis flowers.
Like all narcotics, the plant traveled internationally. From the 12th through 16th centuries, Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa ate hashish or cannabis resin rather than smoke it. At some point by the 14th century, southeast Asians traveled to Ethiopia and traded cannabis with the local Bantu population, including Swahili, Zulu, and Xhosa people. During the Bantu Migration, cannabis was traded throughout the continent so that by the time the Dutch arrived to colonize southern Africa, smoking was widespread. Just like the other plants, colonizing European countries criminalized cannabis usage throughout the late 19th through mid-20th century, only for the decriminalization process to begin soon after when the plant was found to have lucrative sales. Also like the other plants, smoking cannabis did not originate in Europe but either southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa.
While similarities exist between narcotics in the real-world and the pipe-weed of Middle-earth, none of the plants sufficiently fit its description. Even if pipe-weed crossed the Sea with the Men of Westernesse to arrive in Middle-earth, just as tobacco and coca crossed the Atlantic Ocean on European ships, the claim that Hobbits were the first to put the plant into pipes does not match these histories. Regardless of what plant family is used for smoking in Middle-earth, growing and imbibing is a source of cultural pride. To use modern academic language for describing Indigenous practices, by methodically recording the history of pipe-weed and its uses, Merry is a culture bearer preserving ancestral knowledge and facilitating intergenerational transmission of learning. In simple English, Merry writes his book so the Hobbits will always remember who they are during their daily life, which includes smoking lots of pipe-weed.
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