A few weeks ago, while preparing for my big reading of The Lord of the Rings, I read up on reading in Tolkien’s wider legendarium. How literate are Middle Earthlings? As I found, not overmuch, though probably more than the real medieval societies Tolkien was inspired by.
Now I have finished my reading of the trilogy, aided by all kinds of supplemental readings and resources. None were more useful or beguiling than Adam Roberts’s essays on re-reading LOTR from earlier this year. They’re all extremely good and worth reading, but it was definitely his commentary on Book Two (that’s Part II of the first book, mind you) that most drew my attention. Of course it did: Roberts embarks on a deep-reading of writing in the novels—not the kind of analysis I did in my last essay, thinking too much about in-world questions about elven alphabets or whatever, but proper literary criticism, bandying about words like textuality, signifier, and all that sweet English department stuff. It is the kind of stuff that only an English teacher could love. But I am an English teacher, so let’s get into it.
Writing, Roberts notices, has a magical efficacy in The Lord of the Rings. When something is written down, it makes things happen. Take the password over the door to Moria, for instance: SPEAK FRIEND AND ENTER. Gandalf spends most of a day overthinking the inscription as a riddle, but it turns out to be a rudimentary literacy test: Speak “friend,” and enter. (I guess the dwarves of Moria figured all orcs are illiterate.) Enact the writing on the wall, and the impenetrable stone door opens.
Deeper into Moria, there’s the Book of Mazarbul, the dusty old chronicle of the city that seems to reenact itself as Gandalf reads it: “We cannot get out,” the author says, besieged in the throne room, “The end comes, drums in the deep…they are coming.” All of this happened years ago, but the Fellowship hears drums in the distance:
There was a hurrying sound of many feet.
‘They are coming!’ cried Legolas.
‘We cannot get out,’ said Gimli.
The Ring is like this, too, enacting the famous words written around its band and etched in the fore-edge of my lovely hardcover copy: One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all / and in the Darkness bind them. This is obviously true of the Ring’s own history and use by Sauron, but it also describes pretty well the status of the Fellowship of the Ring: bound by the common cause of the Ring’s destruction, hurled into the darkness (quite literally, several times), and their fates ruled by its power.
As Roberts notices, this idea of text-power was almost certainly familiar to Tolkien, the Oxford medievalist. Throughout the European middle ages, there was a widespread practice of charms, objects inscribed with magic words and phrases to cast spells or effect changes. Charms are like the written equivalent of a spoken incantation: instead of saying the magic words, you write them down, and the object bearing those words is imbued with magic.
Charm-writing was a binding force, one that could easily turn into manipulation, control, and other kinds of Sauron-work. Roberts:
What Tolkien does with the One Ring is take the binding logic—a medieval charm, written-upon with a spell, promised to bind health to the body, or bind body and soul together—to an extrapolated extreme. Binding soul and body together with a charm might address a temporary, potentially fatal illness, but beyond that particular moment it runs the rusk of turning the wearer into a Tithonus-like nightmare, dragging on long past his natural term. Binding a lover to you—or binding your followers, or slaves, to you—also works, master-slave-dialectically (not that Tolkien would have any truck with Hegel, of course; but … you know) to bind yourself as slave. And so you become a wraith, incapable of independence life [sic] or thought.
This is writing, for Tolkien. It binds. A oral tradition is flexible, living, growing and adapting as tales and poems are passed from mouth to mouth. But once something is written down, it becomes, as it were, contractual.
This is a neat theory, and I like it a lot. It certainly explains the abundance of poetry and song in the book, and why Tolkien places oral culture on the side of the good: the most inveterate versifiers in Middle Earth are, by far, Hobbits and elves. Tolkien’s good men, like Aragorn, Gandalf, and the Rohirrim, sing all the time, but crabby old Denethor never sings, and Saruman monologues incessantly from his steel tower. We hear no music at all in Mordor, whether from the orcs or Sauron’s human slaves. If Mordor has any music, it would be like that of the mythical tribe Eliot Weinberger writes about, deep in the jungle, who only have one song with one line, repeated without end: “The king has all the power!”
But Roberts’s idea has a flaw, which he identifies but never addresses: Bilbo’s little red book of adventures and elf-lore. Unlike the other texts, which make things happen, Bilbo’s book covers things that have already happened: Bilbo’s adventures in The Hobbit, and at the end of the trilogy, when Frodo takes it up, the War of the Ring and his part in it. And since this red book is presented by Tolkien in his introduction and throughout the appendices as a primary source for the “history” he is writing in The Lord of the Rings, this is arguably the most important text in the whole series. Writing is different in the Shire, it seems.
The Shire, though, isn’t like other provinces, and hobbits aren’t like other folks. It’s a well-worn observation at this point that the Shire is out of step with the times around it: if Gondor and Rohan are modeled on northern Europe’s middle ages, the Shire seems to be several centuries ahead, into the early modern age. Two staple crops of Hobbiton—potatoes and the beloved pipeweed—are New World imports, unknown in Europe until the 16th century. This isn’t nitpicking—fantasy is free to take its liberties—but they stand out more immediately than other post-medieval institutions in hobbitdom, like democratically-elected mayors, the constabulary, and the post office.
Yes, the Shire has a post office. And this isn’t some Roman or Chinese-style imperial service, existing mostly to help the emperor tell his generals which villages to torch and which rebels to flay; Bilbo uses it to send birthday invites and receive letters from his friends. And since the Shire has no central government or tax office that we can see, we can only assume that this national postal service must subsist on its fees, suggesting widespread use, which in turn indicates a highly-developed culture of literacy in the Shire.
This is all distinctly modern, in the same way that the early Shire chapters (as well as the Scouring of the Shire at the very end of the trilogy) are distinctly unlike the rest of the series. Tolkien’s voice in these Shire sections is chatty, discursive, ironic, and detached, with attention paid to individual characteristics and foibles. That is to say, the Shire is written as if in a 19th century novel, of the type that Tolkien grew up with. Hobbits are a modern folk—still pre-industrial, sure, but their post-offices and tobacco are decidedly post-medieval. They write letters, invitations, and memoirs, and it’s not hard to imagine hobbit novelists, reveling in intricate, small-town backbiting and convoluted family trees.
It’s only as we leave the Shire that the tone of the narration begins to change, and indeed the genre, too: from the modern novel to the chivalric romance, as the Fellowship forms and goes a-questing on their anti-Grail mission; then from the chivalry of a few noble knights to the older epic form, as our principal actors become not single warriors but entire states and armies, clashing at Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith and then finally into the spooky depths of myth, as Aragorn marches into the Lands of the Dead, and Frodo goes into the chthonic hellscape of Mordor. Then we go back again, neatly, in reverse over the last few chapters, back through the epic (Aragorn is crowned), the romance (the Fellowship has a few final exploits on the road home home), then the very modern, with the whole story ironically parodied in the Scouring of the Shire. (Note: Don Quixote, the first “modern” novel, was also a satire of chivalrous romance.) The orcs are now just unshaven country louts, and the Dark Lord Sauron is echoed by the decrepit, homeless Saruman, fucking up the Shire mostly out of spite, and because he refused to die courageously in the story’s earlier, more heroic phase when he had the chance.
This journey of genres is mirrored in the style of narration, too. The density of Lo! and Verily! gets higher as the story gets nobler, and the speeches get longer and more flowery as we get more epic. In the last, mythic chapters in Return of the King, we have monsters and cannibal-like orcs and avenging ghouls, and the writing in these chapters is appropriately saturated with blood, mystery, and omen.
Now, I’m shooting very much from the hip here, but if the literary culture of hobbits is modern(ish), I think we can look for similar parallels in the other cultures of Middle Earth. The elves, who borrow so much of their language from Welsh and other Celtic languages, seem to have a similar penchant for improvisation and oral tradition that Ireland, Wales, and Scotland held onto much more vigorously than the rest of northern Europe. Writing, for the men of Gondor, seems to be largely a matter of chronicles and histories, at least judging by Gandalf’s trip to the stacks of Minas Tirith. Rohan, farther back in time, is very much a country of songs and lays, much of it about horses, wars, or both. Mordor, the violent, distant East with a language inspired by Akkadian and Hurrian, seems to have a whiff of the ancient Fertile Crescent about it, with its immortal God-King issuing divine decrees from his Babelic tower. Sauron, if he wrote books, would almost certainly write the kind of bloody, repetitive, boastful propaganda that the Assyrians wrote in their chronicles.
Charm writing never really went away, but like most European magical traditions, it was defanged, ironized, and diluted. It’s hard to imagine hobbits having much truck with them. For men, dwarves, and elves, living farther back in the past, they are a very serious matter; and for ancient Sauron, magic is indistinguishable from politics by other means, just as Sumerians and Babylonians had court astrologers.
It’s often said that the lurking theme of all classic fantasy literature is the tale of how the magic died. Much of Tolkien’s own novels are, within his own legendarium, a long apology for why the elves left Middle Earth. Sauron plays a big part in all of that, of course. But it might also be because a pair of hobbits destroyed Mordor’s magic writing, and turned the world into prose.
Linkage
The monthly link roundup has been a bit awkward lately, so for a while I’m going to just experiment with throwing a few quick links to interesting articles I’ve read since my last essay. Read or ignore at your whim.
Ukrainian Is My Native Language, but I Had to Learn It: Ukraine is crowdsourcing its de-Russification and coming up with new slang from the war. I look forward to weaseling Makroniti and Zatrydni into conversation.
Auden’s original New York Times review of The Fellowship of the Ring, 69 years ago this week: “Mr. Tolkien has succeeded superbly, and what happened in the year of the Shire 1418 in the Third Age of Middle Earth is not only fascinating in A. D. 1954 but also a warning and an inspiration. No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy than The Fellowship of the Ring.”
A stolen Christopher Columbus letter found in Delaware returns to Italy decades later. Why Delaware?
Why Generative AI Won’t Disrupt Books: I think I’ve said a version of this a few times in this space, but I agree nonetheless. It must say something about the persistence of the book’s prestige, even as fewer people actually read them, that tech startups keep feeling like they have to “improve” an invention whose form has been fixed for centuries.
From the Archives
If you want more writing on the intersection of magic and modernity, I wrote about Athanasius Kircher, the Man Who Knew Everything, a few years back:
Bonus Track:
I made this!
That’s all for this time. Happy reading!