Like I said a few weeks ago, one of my big summer reading projects is to revisit The Lord of the Rings and the secondary literature around Tolkien’s epic. This morning, I finished The Fellowship of the Ring. So far, I’m enjoying it. When I last read it as a teen, I remember all the early Shire chapters being a slog of stupid names and pipeweed. This time, I found myself chuckling along at Tolkien’s gentle, loving satire of hobbits and their foibles. (I still find the Tom Bombadil stuff arduous, though.)
More to the point, the early hobbit chapters reminded me of one of my favorite Tolkien theories. As no stone of Tolkien’s work has been left unturned, the theory has been rigorously investigated and thoroughly debunked. The idea is manifestly wrong. However, it’s wrong in an interesting way that says a lot about why we read fantasy, and why we care about the “real” inspiration for fantastical places. So today, we’ll consider the idea that hobbits are from Kentucky.
Here are the facts: Tolkien never visited the United States, and as far as we know, he never publicly expressed any interest in Appalachia. The Kentucky Hobbit Hypothesis was first circulated by Alan Barnett, historian and college friend of Tolkien. Barnett, a native Kentuckian, studied at Oxford alongside Tolkien. They would talk late into the night about all sorts of things, Barnett said, though Tolkien seemed to have a special fascination with Barnett’s stories of Kentucky folk: their culture of gossip and porch chats, the ballads and tall tales, the old English elocutions still used (I hear tell, either way as is, etc.), the rolling, grassy hills, and of course the omnipresent pipeweed, grown in a thousand varieties, central to the economy and culture, and its smoking treated as everything from a spectator sport to a meditative practice.
Barnett didn’t keep in close contact with Tolkien, only trading a few letters a year with him after leaving Oxford. Amusingly, when people first started asking Barnett about his famous friend, he didn’t even know that dear old Ronald had a sideline in scribbling fiction.
Two writers who spoke with Barnett went on to circulate the Kentucky Hobbit Hypothesis. One was Daniel Grotta, freelance journalist and Tolkien’s first biographer. The Architect of Middle Earth was not authorized by the Tolkien estate and is not well-regarded by fans and scholars today, but sold reasonably well and did much to spread the KHH. I haven’t read Grotta and don’t plan to. The other proponent of the theory, though, is my literary hero.
Guy Davenport (1927 - 2005) was an American oddity. He was born in the middle of nowhere, South Carolina, and illiterate until the age of thirteen; by twenty-three, he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. By thirty, he had a Ph.D from Harvard and was an authority on modernist poetry. He was an accomplished painter of abstract art (“Grids are good for you,” he often said), openly bisexual (in the South, in the 1960s), an amateur translator of ancient Greek, and a world-class curmudgeon who never learned to drive and often picked up his own firewood while walking home from lectures. As if that wasn’t enough, in his early forties, he started writing the rambling, allusive short fiction and essays that still have a small but fierce following today.
One of those essays is a little gem called “Hobbitry,” collected in The Geography of the Imagination. Although Davenport was an echt-modernist who read Finnegans Wake and Aeolic Greek poetry for fun, his outsider status and low-class origins also kept him from being a snob. At a time when most reader of The Lord of the Rings were kids, nerds, and hippies, this cosmopolitan professor was an enthusiastic Tolkienite. One of the pleasures in reading his correspondence with fellow genius-polymath Hugh Kenner is seeing these two hyperliterate boffins gushing over The Lord of the Rings as they worked through it together in 1963.
“Finished Tolkien’s trilogy yesterday: a major work. He has enough invention every fifty pages to last a minor writer a life-time . . . and clarity! My Gawd, what clarity of eye and heart in those books. The power of Wagner, the eye of Disney, the inventiveness of Shakespeare.”
And here he is in 1973, writing Tolkien’s obit for The National Review,1 calling his work the best popular literature of the 20th century.
This brings us to “Hobbitry” and its two astonishing claims. The first is a personal connection: Davenport had studied under Tolkien, years before Lord of the Rings was published:
“Not until years later could I know that this vague and incomprehensible lecturer, having poked around on a page of the dread ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ for an hour, muttering place names and chuckling over variant readings, biked out to Sandfield Road in Headington and moved Frodo and Sam toward Mordor. Even when I came to read The Lord of the Rings I had trouble, as I still do, realizing that it was written by the mumbling and pedantic Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien.”
Davenport, a naturalized Kentuckian, somehow came into contact with Tolkien’s old friend Barnett, and through their conversations Davenport became a believer in the Kentucky Hobbit Hypothesis, laying out the claims in “Hobbitry.”
I can’t pretend to be an unbiased observer here. Besides being a massive Guy Davenport nerd, I was for a while in high school nicknamed Pippin by some of my friends. Like the hobbit Peregrin “Pippin” Took, I was rather short, a chattery know-it-all who let his hair grow out into the same kind of wavy mess that Billy Boyd wore in the Lord of the Rings films. And when I first read “Hobbitry,” I thought back to my family history. Like a lot of American Davises, my people were an Anglo-Welsh-Irish jumble who, on crossing the Atlantic, settled quickly in Appalachia, America’s Celtic hinterland. So, looking like Pippin as I do, and having Kentucky roots, there was a solid chance that I was part hobbit.
I’ve loved this idea for a long time, and have frequently repeated it in conversations over the years. Of course, when I first got John Garth’s The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien in preparation for my big Tolkien re-read, the first thing I did was jump to the index and look up Kentucky.
And there it was, on page 21: “Were hobbits inspired by tales of Kentucky folk?” Garth lays out the case as I’ve repeated them above. The answer, as you can guess, is “probably not.” Alan Barnett seems to have repeated his claims about Tolkien and Kentucky to several sources over the years, but as far as scholars can, none of Barnett’s archived exchanges with Tolkien ever mention anything about Appalachia. Meanwhile, there is much more—an entire chapter’s worth—describing the affinities between the Shire and the English West Midlands where Tolkien grew up, and which he freely alluded to using as inspiration. More to the point, Tolkien scholar David Bratman tried Davenport’s suggestion of looking up hobbit names in the Lexington phone book, and found none. (The full article isn’t available online, but you can see a summary here.)
This doesn’t make any resemblance between the Shire, the Midlands, and Kentucky a coincidence, though. It just means that Kentucky, like much of the American South, has a lot of old English in it. So if there is anything of the Shire in Kentucky, it’s almost certainly because there’s a lot of the Midlands in Kentucky, too. It would be more accurate to say, then, that hobbits and Kentucky share a common ancestry.
So much for the Kentucky Hobbit Hypothesis. But just because the idea didn’t influence Tolkien, it doesn’t mean that it can’t influence his readers. The art of reading, after all, is very different from the art of writing, and just as important. The fact remains that many readers want to know what inspired Middle Earth. Are the Rohirrim based on Anglo-Saxon Mercia? Do Orcs speak Hurrian? Are the Elves supposed to be Welsh, or Finnish? Why does Mordor look so much like Birmingham?
The answer, of course, is that a fantasy world is never an exact index of some real place or time, and that if Tolkien wanted to tell a story about Birmingham, he’d set it in Birmingham. Authors use bits and pieces of things from everywhere to tell the stories that they want to tell—this is nothing new.
But I think it says a lot about us, as readers, that we always come back to the mundane origins of fantastical worlds. On one level, this is just an appreciation for the alchemy of world-making. Middle Earth feels more real to me than most countries, and I know about as many words in Elvish as I do in Chinese.2
More importantly, though, I think these connections re-enchant our own world. I repeated the Kentucky Hobbit Hypothesis for years because it imbued my world and my ancestry with a weird aura, slightly funny but also a bit ennobling. Who wouldn’t want to hear that they are descended from hobbits?
In the same way, walking around Philadelphia, I sometimes see African-Americans with Wakanda tattoos; they know that Black Panther isn’t true, but the story reflects something of their own hopes and pride. (Hopefully some of them also enjoyed seeing dark-skinned hobbits in The Rings of Power, too). And this is true of all the other errant readings of Tolkien, from the idea that The Lord of the Rings is an allegory of nuclear war (it was written too early) to the Cold War anti-Soviet reading (a huge stretch). Reading a work of fiction wrong doesn’t always mean it’s not reading well. As always with books, it’s not just what the author puts in; it’s what you get out, and where you take it. Tolkien’s story lets you see the world in a new way, if you let it.
From the Archives:
The stories we tell ourselves, and that we borrow from literature, are important. But they can also be misused. I wrote about that here, in this book review.
Bonus Track:
More music this week. I was bored at home, so I made an all-Mellotron cover (emulated on computer) of the “Windmill Song” from The Legend of Zelda.
And that’s it for this one. Happy reading!
The fact that a bisexual leftist utopian professor’s first choice of publishing venue was William F. Buckley’s right-wing rag continues to astonish me. I don’t know if that says more about Davenport’s character, or his times, or our own times, where such a connection is unfathomable. Apparently, he just got on well with the literature team at NR, but never glanced at the rest of it.
To be clear, that’s only like four or five words, max, when you don’t count proper nouns.