A Book Review . . . A Fresh Exploration Of The Shire

By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN

The Hobbit Party: The Vision Tolkien Got and the West Forgot by Jonathan Witt and Jay W. Richards (Ignatius Press: San Francisco: 2014, 232 pp.), $21.95. Available through www.ignatius.com or by calling 1-800-651-1531.

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To read about a Hobbit party is to expect a scene of hospitality in the home of Bilbo Baggins in the setting of the shire, but the title of the book also plays on the word “party” to denote a political view or social teaching that Tolkien’s novels offer in addition to their charm and imaginative power as works of fiction.
The authors present a fresh, insightful reading of Tolkien’s masterpieces that interprets them in the light of the social teachings of the Church without compromising in the least their greatness as works of art that depict the human condition.
For example, the first chapter, entitled “In a Hole in the Ground There Lived an Enemy of Big Government,” explores the shire not only as Bilbo’s pleasant life of simple domestic pleasures, but also as a way of life that resists collectivism, invasive government regulation, consumerism, and the bureaucratic state:
“This gentle civilization appears to have no department of unmotorized vehicles, no internal revenue service, no government official telling people who may or who may not have laying hens in their backyard, no government schools lining up hobbit children in geometric rows to teach regimented behavior and groupthink.”
The social life of the shire with its limited government and “air of freedom, of ordered liberty” stands in stark contrast to the modern regulatory state and its “international corporate-government cronyism” that always imagines government as monolithic and global. Small is beautiful.
The third chapter, “The Lonely Mountain and the Market,” relates the grasping character of Thorin Oakenshield, the miserly Master of Lake-town, and the insatiable greed of Smaug the dragon to the avarice of unbridled capitalism when the worship of Mammon becomes their false god. Smaug, for example, hoards treasure by sitting on it and guarding it with no sense of sharing or entrepreneurship, “risking nothing, investing in nothing, clutching everything.”
Bilbo, in contrast, is adventuresome, daring enough to go alone in the tunnel twice to discover the dragon, and in no way tempted by the hoard of wealth before him to fill his pockets with jewels. Bilbo’s sane idea of money is compared to the enterprising qualities of the honest bourgeoisie class, “the virtues of exertion, competitiveness, and entrepreneurial daring that allowed them to join and grow the middle class in the Middle Ages.” Of all the characters competing for a share in the wealth of Smaug after his defeat, only Bilbo sacrifices the precious Arkenstone to end the feuding about money for the sake of the common good.
The famous tribute paid to Bilbo serves as ancient wisdom for a modern economy burdened by overspending, overtaxing, consumer debt, and usurious interest: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
The chapter entitled “The Ring of Power Corrupts Absolutely” identifies the political problem of modernity: the ideologies of the 20th century that exalt the power of the state and create Fascist, National Socialist, and Communistic governments that reduce man to workers, bodies without souls, and creatures of the state with no inviolable human rights or human dignity.
The fatal, magical nature of “the ring’s siren call” in Tolkien’s work symbolizes “glorious power without limit” and predicates tyranny and oppression in all its various political forms, “a landscape of fear and domination” infested with spies and informers like the Thought Police in Orwell’s 1984.
The power of the ring with its invisibility — the temptation of doing evil without detection — the authors relate to Lord Sauron’s Panopticon society, a term from Jeremy Bentham that signifies a version of Big Brother: “an all-seeing watcher unseen by those being watched” who “has the freedom to come and go, while his prisoners are never free of the possibility they’re being watched.” Once again absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The chapter “The Free Peoples and the Master of Middle Earth” illuminates Tolkien’s defense of human freedom, natural rights, and personal choices that the authors describe as the “ordered liberty” of moral agents created in God’s image with the gift of art, inventiveness, and skills that Tolkien called “Sub-Creation.” In an age enamored of explanations based on theories of determinism invented by B.F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, “Scientific materialism and logical positivism were all the rage, and neither had any room in its procrustean bed for agents that can make free choices.”
Tolkien’s characters, however, do not represent atoms in the void or “matter in motion” but, like Bilbo, make wise, courageous moral decisions that lead to luck, destiny, and a sense of the presence of divine Providence instrumental in the battle between good and evil. Man’s moral freedom and creative nature shape all of Tolkien’s heroes: “We are made in the image of the creative God to be sub-creators….God created clay and straw, but left it to us to make bricks.” Tolkien honors man as noble, heroic, magnanimous, and godlike.
The chapter “The Just War of the King” argues that Tolkien’s idea of battle both condemns the wanton use of force to subjugate others and defends the use of force to oppose the unjust aggression of nations intent on domination. Incorporating the Church’s criteria for a just war (just cause, right intention, last resort, probability of success), the chapter examines the major battles in Tolkien’s work led by the wisest men in the stories who reject both pacifism and preventive war.
These leaders do not fall into the category of the unscrupulous “realists” who do not “care about right and wrong. They just believe it’s better to do what needs to be done to win as quickly as possible, even if it means putting aside justice.” Wise leaders like Gandalf have no illusions about man’s fallen nature and the cost of war, but they accept the hard truth that the absolute power of the ring embodies diabolical evil that must be confronted, fought, and destroyed: “…there are times when the right and just course is to take up arms and fight unreservedly against the forces of darkness.” Tolkien was no sentimentalist.
The chapter “The Scouring of the Shire” captures Tolkien’s affection for God’s created world, the natural beauty of small rural villages and their charming landscapes — a pastoral realm that the factories of industrialism transformed into drab suburban living. The authors contrast Tolkien’s love of rural life with Rousseau’s naive primitivism (“return to Nature”) and with Darwin’s menacing picture of Nature as the survival of the fittest.

A Death Wish

The characters under the influence of the invisible ring of power suffer an alienation from the natural world. In Frodo’s words as he approaches Mount Doom, “No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of tree or star are left to me.”
The authors reveal Tolkien’s sacramental view of the universe in which the invisible things of God are known by the visible and illuminate his appreciation of Nature’s fertility and abundance — the opposite of the Manichaean view that regards the physical world as corrupt matter and reproduction as the propagation of evil.
As the authors perceptively observe, an aspect of The Lord of the Rings often overlooked is “that a culture’s lack of fertility is the effect and cause of cultural decline” — a death wish summarized in the words of Faramir to Frodo: Some mighty kings “made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons.” Sam Gamgee and Rose, however, have 13 children.
In short, The Hobbit Party broadens Tolkien’s Catholic vision to include not only its view of the human condition and the reality of human nature but also the Church’s social teaching about government, economics, private property, the family, war, and the environment. The authors do not impose an ideology on these works of fiction but elicit from the stories the seminal ideas waiting for germination and development.
Always stimulating and enriching, the whole book is a pure delight for lovers of Tolkien and a superb introduction to literature that is both Catholic in its worldview and catholic in its universality.