Hobbit Virtues
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Hobbit Virtues

Rediscovering J. R. R. Tolkien's Ethics from The Lord of the Rings

Christopher A. Snyder

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eBook - ePub

Hobbit Virtues

Rediscovering J. R. R. Tolkien's Ethics from The Lord of the Rings

Christopher A. Snyder

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About This Book

A response to our fractured political discourse, Hobbit Virtues speaks to the importance of "virtue ethics" by examining the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien—with particular attention to his hobbits. Tolkien's works resonate with so many readers in part because Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin demonstrate Classical, Judeo-Christian, Medieval, and even Hindu and Confucian virtues. Tolkien ennobles the small, the humble, and the marginalized in his Middle-earth writings and presents leaders who are hesitant to exercise power, are courteous, and value wisdom and learning. Each chapter in Hobbit Virtues consists of a wide-ranging discussion of a single virtue, exemplified by a character in Middle-earth, explaining its philosophical or theological roots and how the virtue is still relevant in a modern democracy. It will also include appendices where readers can find passages in Tolkien's and Lewis's works that discuss virtue ethics, and a glossary of virtues from ancient to modern, East to West. Tolkien's readers come from many different religious and secular backgrounds and the pleasure and profundity of Hobbit Virtues is that mutual respect for public virtues is, especially now, necessary for a well-functioning pluralistic society.

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Publisher
Pegasus Books
Year
2020
ISBN
9781643134116

Chapter 1
TENDING YOUR GARDEN

In the darkly satirical novel Candide (1759), written by the philosophe Voltaire, the young hero goes on a quest in part to discover the meaning of life. After many misadventures, he and a group of friends find themselves forming a community on a small farm near Istanbul. When at the end of the novel Candide contemplates the simple but honest lifestyle of his Turkish neighbors, he offers to his companions the following words of wisdom: “We must take care of our own garden.”
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) shares little in common with the urbane world-traveler Voltaire. Yet, with his Hobbits, Tolkien seems to suggest that cultivating gardens is important, even noble, if not entirely sufficient. It is a particularly English virtue to garden, even if it is only a tiny patch of green. Tolkien was himself born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, but spent much of his childhood in the rural English Midlands. He came to idolize the small farms, rolling hills, rivers, and forests of western England and Wales, reinforced by his country walks in Oxfordshire, where he lived, as a student and as a professor, for most of his life. From these experiences he constructed the Shire, that part of Middle-earth inhabited by Hobbits. Growing things in the Shire, and the living and intelligent trees in the forests of Middle-earth, are at the very heart of the “secondary world” Tolkien created through words and images. In the drawings and paintings that he made to accompany The Hobbit, trees and other flora play a prominent part.
Hobbits are small and burrow holes in the ground, like rabbits (a not coincidental similarity). They enjoy a close friendship with the earth, according to Tolkien.1 Bilbo Baggins, hero of The Hobbit, is very proud of his garden and bequeaths it to his young cousin Frodo Baggins, hero of The Lord of the Rings. Both well-to-do Hobbits, however, have gardeners who do much of the work for them: Gaffer Gamgee and his son Samwise. The Gaffer and Sam are themselves philosophers, though of a much humbler stature than Voltaire. The Gaffer dispenses life advice through folksy maxims, while his son has a romantic and adventurous heart, clumsily composing poetry. “You are a new people and a new world to me,” exclaims Faramir, the noble captain of Gondor, when he first meets Frodo and Sam. “Your land must be a realm of peace and content, and there must gardeners be in high honour.” Yes, gardeners are greatly honored in the Shire, confirms Frodo.2
Tolkien seems to be having a bit of fun here, satirizing the English love of gardening, embedded class distinctions, and the folksy advice given by farmers and craftsmen. Yet there is some serious philosophy in all this Hobbit talk. Hearth and home, creature comforts, food and family—these are very important things to Hobbits, as they were to Tolkien and his Oxford friends, especially those of the group Tolkien and Lewis called the Inklings. “Human grandeur is a very dangerous thing,” warns Doctor Pangloss in Candide, and indeed most Hobbits avoid ostentatious displays of wealth and getting involved in the politics and wars of the Big Folk. But this contentedness is not enough, and the isolation of the Hobbits is not sufficient to provide them with security. Bilbo has some “Tookish blood,” a desire for adventure buried deep inside him, and he needs a little push from the Wizard Gandalf to leave the security of his home to go on an adventure where he will face great malice, violent greed, and ultimately a great war. Sam desires “a nice little hole” in the Shire “with a bit of garden of my own,” and the Elf-queen Galadriel gives Sam the gift of a small box filled with earth from her orchard, promising him that if he makes it back to the Shire, the soil from Lothlórien will make his own little garden without equal in Middle-earth.3 Frodo must make great sacrifices of comfort and prosperity to prevent all of Middle-earth from falling into tyranny and slavery. Even with the great tyrant Sauron defeated, Frodo and his friends return to a Shire devastated by industry and the lesser tyranny of “Sharkey” and his thugs. While Sam the gardener uses Galadriel’s gift to restore the Shire to a “good green and pleasant land,” Frodo’s war wounds will not heal and allow him peace and domesticity. Thus it was for many of England’s returning soldiers in 1919.
Readers of Candide and of Tolkien’s fiction will of course recognize that the garden is heavily symbolic. It recalls the Garden of Eden in Genesis, fruitful yet susceptible to serpents and sin. “We got to get ourselves back to the Garden,” sing Crosby, Stills, and Nash in the Joni Mitchell–penned song “Woodstock.” Can we get back to that Edenic state, through our own efforts? C. S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, begins his discussion of charity with a parable about a garden:

 a garden will not fence and weed itself.
 A garden is a good thing
 [but] it will remain a garden, as distinct from a wilderness, only if someone does these things to it. Its real glory is of quite a different kind. The very fact that it needs constant weeding and pruning bears witness to that glory. It teems with life. It glows with colour and smells like heaven and puts forward at every hour of a summer day beauties which man never could have created and could not even, on his own resources, have imagined.
 When God planted a garden He set a man over it and set the man under Himself. When He planted the garden of our nature and caused the flowering, fruiting loves to grow there, He set our will to “dress” them.
 [Man’s] laborious—and largely negative—services are indispensable. If they were needed when the garden was still Paradisal, how much more now when the soil has gone sour and the worst weeds seem to thrive on it best?4
Tolkien was very fond of Oxford’s Botanic Garden, which sits between Lewis’s college (Magdalen) and his own (Merton), and there it is said grew his favorite tree. Both men could gaze out the windows of their offices upon their own college’s gardens. Addison’s Walk, which winds along the willow-lined River Cherwell between Magdalen and the Botanic Garden, was the location of the famous late-night conversation between the two English professors that led, in part, to Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. As Tolkien read aloud most of The Lord of the Rings to Lewis and the other Inklings, Lewis would have recognized and appreciated the many appearances of gardens and gardeners in the novel, and of course the importance of trees to Tolkien’s whole legendarium.
Cultivating one’s garden can also be seen as tending to our individual souls, cultivating virtues through reason and discipline. Voltaire and Tolkien may both have had in mind the advice given by Socrates in Plato’s Republic: the ideal (or at least stable) state requires citizens who have their own affairs in order, who govern their passions and then, and only then, are equipped to govern others. Tyrants, argue Plato and Aristotle, are men whose selfish urges dictate most of their actions, men who rule arbitrarily, capable sometimes of helping some people succeed but who ultimately lead to political instability, corruption, and a lack of social and economic justice. Middle-earth’s Master of Lake-town, Saruman/Sharkey, Morgoth, and Sauron are all tyrants in this philosophical sense, and Gandalf and Galadriel fear that they too would rule this way if they were given the power of the One Ring. Faramir and Aragorn are similarly wary of political power without self-control, and the one figure in Middle-earth who has mastered his “inner-regime”—Tom Bombadil—wants no part of war and politics.5
Hobbits are to be found somewhere between the tyrants and the Wise. Their small stature keeps them from having aspirations of political grandeur, yet they can only resist the One Ring, not master it. Gandalf is drawn to the Hobbits because they seemingly possess qualities or virtues seldom seen in the great cities and realms of the West. It is hard to surprise a Wizard, but neither Saruman the White nor Gandalf the Grey fully comprehend the capabilities of Hobbits. No power in the world knows everything about Hobbits, confesses Gandalf. “Among the Wise I am the only one who goes in for hobbit-lore: an obscure branch of knowledge, but full of surprises.”6 Virtue ethics, a branch of moral philosophy, fell out of favor among philosophers as the Great War and bloody revolutions challenged the positivism and progress of Western society. Deontology (following the rules and doing one’s duty at all costs) and consequentialism (especially utilitarianism and hedonism) at first filled this intellectual void, but at the turn of the 21st century, virtue ethics was beginning to make a comeback. Tolkien—whose life spanned from Victorian optimism to the existential crises of the 1960s and early ’70s—responded to these vicissitudes in philosophy and ideology through his Middle-earth writings, though often in subtle ways that many readers have overlooked.
While in The Hobbit Tolkien presents to us these halflings as a satirical mirror, poking fun at our bourgeois concerns and at the English character, in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings he stresses that these “remarkable people” are “relatives of ours,” but they “lived quietly” in Middle-earth and “seemed of very little importance” to their neighbors, the Elves and the Dwarves.7 They “love peace and quiet and good tilled earth” and do not understand machines more complicated than mills, looms, and hand tools. They do not study magic but possess from heredity certain skills—most notably quickness and the ability to escape being seen. The Shire is a tiny nation of farmers and gardeners, brewers of beer and cultivators of pipe-weed. Hobbits are not a warlike people and never fought among themselves, are slow to quarrel, and do not hunt living things for sport. They are clannish, lovers of genealogy, and follow the law (The Rules) through free will because they are “both ancient and just.” This despite having very little formal government: no king, only an elected mayor and a hereditary Thain (military captain), the latter mostly an honorary title.
We learn from the Prologue of The Lord of the Rings that growing food and eating it occupies most of a Hobbit’s time. Smoking pipes and blowing smoke-rings consumes a fair share of that time as well, and they admire poetry, music, and riddle-making. They love parties and giving gifts to others on their own birthdays. At the emotional climax of The Hobbit, the dying Dwarf king, Thorin Oakenshield, asks Bilbo (whom he once described as “descendant of rats!”) for forgiveness and praises Hobbit virtues:
“There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage, and some wisdom, blended in good measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”8
The words of a dying king should be taken seriously. Is Tolkien here presenting us with a “Hobbit philosophy” to be ranked among those of the Wise? Consider Thorin’s choice of words: good, kindly, courage, wisdom, valued. These are terms one can find in the ethics of Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and many other philosophers and religious teachers. That Thorin says that Bilbo has some courage and some wisdom blended in good measure is a significant nod toward Aristotle and the Golden Mean. That food and cheer and song are to be valued above gold, however, suggests that Aristotle’s Good Life (eudaimon) lived in the free community (polis) should include epicurean and aesthetic delights as well.
How do we identify the Good? How does one display courage and wisdom? How do we discern the balance, or good measure, of these virtues? How does one develop “character” or prove one’s worth? Are there limits to when, where, and how much food and cheer and song we can enjoy? These questions are answered, in part, by Tolkien when he tackled the more ambitious literary project of The Lord of the Rings. Newly introduced Hobbits—Frodo, Sam, Peregrin “Pippin” Took, and Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck—become vehicles for Tolkien to explore in greater depth the virtues listed by Thorin and to add others, most notably fellowship, love, and self-sacrifice. We will examine each of these “Hobbit virtues” in chapters two through eight of the present book. Gandalf also returns in The Lord of the Rings to act as mentor and spiritual guide for the younger Hobbits, and we see through many adventures that Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, and Men are also capable of virtue as well as vice. This will be explored in chapter nine.
“Is virtue [aretĂȘ] teachable?” Socrates is asked at the outset of Plato’s dialog Meno, “or is it rather acquired by practice? Or
 does it come to men by nature
?” Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, argued that in order to be “virtuous” one must learn, practice, and habituate virtues. We find this in many ancient ethical systems, and moral teachers like Jesus often used agrarian imagery and parables: plowing soil, planting seeds, growing and cultivating. The Confucian sage Mencius (ca. 372–289 B.C.) stressed that one must cultivate jen (humaneness) and yi (rightness) as the farmer cultivates grain, while the Chinese general, governor, and philosopher Wang Yangming (1472–1529) taught the concept of moral self-cultivation through practicing a tradition that has been transmitted (chuanxi).9 The Psalms and Proverbs are replete with examples of moral cultivation: those who delight in the law of the Lord “are like trees / planted by streams of water, / which yield their fruit in its season / and their leaves do not wither” (Psalm 1); “Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity” (Psalms 22); “A capable wife
 considers a field and buys it; / with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard” (Proverbs 31). The Romans were so proud of their agrarian roots that the farming life permeated their poetry and philosophy. Horace, in the Odes, recommends the cultivation of tranquility and contentment, while Virgil, in Book Two of the Georgics, praises the simple country life in contrast with the corruption of the city. In Zen Buddhism, creating a garden—even a dry landscape of rocks and sand—is to create a space of simple beauty where one can meditate on truth and meaning.
When the dying Thorin first describes Hobbit philosophy to Bilbo, we also hear an echo of one of the oldest literary texts ever preserved, The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2000 BC). The Sumerian hero-king Gilgamesh, who has just lost his close friend Enkidu to death, seeks wisdom from an unlikely source—an ale-wife:
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