Tolkien Fans: Comments and Questions

[Voboy]

There were higher and lower social roles, but it doesn't seem to me to be the Edwardian Upstairs Downstairs that Tolkien actually grew up in.

Tolkien didn't really grow up that way. He was the son of a bank manager, transplanted from Africa to an unfamiliar Birmingham and then taken in by a priest after being orphaned in late childhood. He could not afford any kind of university education until he gained (barely) an Oxford exhibition on his second try. He was not familiar with wealth and, as a Catholic, was no part of the English establishment.

His twin tickets to respectability were a university degree, gained on his brains and merits, and his service as a combatant officer, gained on the uncontrollable fact that there was a war on and everyone was joining up.

Tolkien would have been familiar with the upstairs/downstairs dynamic only because he'd have heard about it, just like us. Sure, he had a batman in the War; every officer did. I have not read his biographies, but I would be surprised if that wasn't his very first experience of having a manservant.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Are there any actual servants in the Shire? I can't recall any. The rich Bilbo doesn't have a butler or a maid. The Gamgees do odd jobs and gardening, like free people today. We don't see what the Took's household is like. Barliman has staff, like any modern pub. There were higher and lower social roles, but it doesn't seem to me to be the Edwardian Upstairs Downstairs that Tolkien actually grew up in.

Y'all finally nerd sniped me into buying the books in searchable e-book form, so:

Sam is repeatedly characterised as Frodo's "servant". In particular, in "The Window on the West" (chapter 5 of Two Towers) [edit: make that chapter 5 of Book Two of The Two Towers]:

Frodo talks to Faramir about "the day when we parted [i.e. the Breaking of the Fellowship], when I and my servant left the Company"
Sam inadvertently blurts out that Boromir wanted the Ring, and then tells Faramir: "Don't you go taking advantage of my master because his servant's no better than a fool."
And the narrator tells us: "Another bed was set beside [Frodo] for his servant."

Also in the Silmarillion: "Frodo the Halfling, it is said, at the bidding of Mithrandir took on himself the burden, and alone with his servant he passed through peril and darkness..."

The Gamgees live "on the Hill itself, in Number 3 Bagshot Row just below Bag End [Bilbo's/Frodo's home]". Gaffer Gamgee is mentioned as having tended the garden at Bag End for 40 years, and Bilbo taught Sam his letters. It may be that Gaffer gets some other jobs as well, but his ties to Bilbo seem to be pretty strong, and Sam's to Frodo even stronger. I suspect the exact nature of Sam's service to Frodo is dictated more by social conventions and economics than by any particular law.

You're right that Bilbo and Frodo don't appear to have any domestic servants. When the dwarves show up unexpectedly at the beginning of The Hobbit, Bilbo brings out all the food and plates himself, until the dwarves start pitching in. Later in LotR the description of Bilbo's grand eleventy-first birthday party seems to suggest friends and hired hands brought in for the occasion, with no mention of servants assisting. There are several other parts early in LotR where one would expect domestics to be mentioned if they were around, and they're not. OTOH, Bilbo and Frodo are noted to be eccentric by hobbit standards, in particular in their living alone, so that doesn't rule out others having domestics; Lobelia doesn't strike me as the kind to do her own dishes.

Bree is outside the Shire, although close enough that they're familiar with hobbits. Barliman Butterbur is human but Nob is identified as his "hobbit servant"; I don't think "servant" and "staff" are mutually exclusive here.

 

[Bamagan]

Y'all finally nerd sniped me into buying the books in searchable e-book form, so:

Sam is repeatedly characterised as Frodo's "servant". In particular, in "The Window on the West" (chapter 5 of Two Towers):

Frodo talks to Faramir about "the day when we parted [i.e. the Breaking of the Fellowship], when I and my servant left the Company"
Sam inadvertently blurts out that Boromir wanted the Ring, and then tells Faramir: "Don't you go taking advantage of my master because his servant's no better than a fool."
And the narrator tells us: "Another bed was set beside [Frodo] for his servant."

Also in the Silmarillion: "Frodo the Halfling, it is said, at the bidding of Mithrandir took on himself the burden, and alone with his servant he passed through peril and darkness..."

The Gamgees live "on the Hill itself, in Number 3 Bagshot Row just below Bag End [Bilbo's/Frodo's home]". Gaffer Gamgee is mentioned as having tended the garden at Bag End for 40 years, and Bilbo taught Sam his letters. It may be that Gaffer gets some other jobs as well, but his ties to Bilbo seem to be pretty strong, and Sam's to Frodo even stronger. I suspect the exact nature of Sam's service to Frodo is dictated more by social conventions and economics than by any particular law.

You're right that Bilbo and Frodo don't appear to have any domestic servants. When the dwarves show up unexpectedly at the beginning of The Hobbit, Bilbo brings out all the food and plates himself, until the dwarves start pitching in. Later in LotR the description of Bilbo's grand eleventy-first birthday party seems to suggest friends and hired hands brought in for the occasion, with no mention of servants assisting. There are several other parts early in LotR where one would expect domestics to be mentioned if they were around, and they're not. OTOH, Bilbo and Frodo are noted to be eccentric by hobbit standards, in particular in their living alone, so that doesn't rule out others having domestics; Lobelia doesn't strike me as the kind to do her own dishes.

Bree is outside the Shire, although close enough that they're familiar with hobbits. Barliman Butterbur is human but Nob is identified as his "hobbit servant"; I don't think "servant" and "staff" are mutually exclusive here.

I believe it's also suggested that, after Sam and Rosie get married and move to Bag End, they 'take care of Mr. Frodo' and/or the house. That suggests something akin to domestic, live-in servants, at least for the couple of years, during part of which Frodo is Acting Mayor, before he takes ship to Valinor. Although I think Sam and Frodo might have seen it differently, especially since he was kind of aggrieved that the Shirefolk didn't recognize or understand what Frodo had done. He may have considered it more like an honor than anything else, helping a loved one who'd come back traumatized from war.

 

[StillStunned]

I believe it's also suggested that, after Sam and Rosie get married and move to Bag End, they 'take care of Mr. Frodo' and/or the house. That suggests something akin to domestic, live-in servants, at least for the couple of years, during part of which Frodo is Acting Mayor, before he takes ship to Valinor. Although I think Sam and Frodo might have seen it differently, especially since he was kind of aggrieved that the Shirefolk didn't recognize or understand what Frodo had done. He may have considered it more like an honor than anything else, helping a loved one who'd come back traumatized from war.

I always interpreted it more as "you're my heir and adopted family, might as well live in my big fancy house." Like Frodo moves in with Bilbo earlier.

 

[TheArsonist]

Frodo invites him to come live with him apparently as a friend and heir (already knowing that he himself is bound for the Grey Havens once he finishes his book), but it's evident that Sam and Rosie took care of the domestic chores: "Frodo knew that he was more lucky himself; for there was not a hobbit in the Shire that was looked after with such care."

I'd say it was a unique arrangement that involved service and was based on affection and devotion. The relationship at this point doesn't fall neatly into one category or the other, although I think we can say with high confidence that it was not motivated by financial dependence. I agree that Sam saw it as an honor, with Frodo having become something like a suffering saint.

 

[Bamagan]

I do wonder just how often wealthy hobbits in the Shire bequeathed their entire estates (presumably substantial, at least by local standards) to unrelated heirs. The general impression from the genealogies is that hobbits tended to have large families, and with an agrarian economy primogeniture would be fairly likely (and hereditary titles like Thain and Master of Buckland suggest the same thing, at least for certain important families). Frodo had many cousins of various degrees that he might have been expected, traditionally anyway, to bestow his goods upon (though it's entirely possible he did leave substantial bequests to various of his relatives without hugely devaluing Sam's new estate). Bilbo and Frodo were relatives, so while the S-Bs were scandalized by having their presumed inheritance placed out of reach, there's no reason to think the community at large thought it strange. Frodo leaving everything to Sam seems like it might be rather more unusual, at least from the hobbitses perspective, even if it makes perfect sense to the readers. Then again, the situation might have been so unusual that the community wouldn't have known quite how to think about it.

 

[TheArsonist]

If we think that Shire society had well-defined social classes (which I don't), they may have seen it as a semi-formal elevation in rank (much like land grants in feudal England bestowed nobility).

Anyway, a point I wanted to make earlier is that yes, the Shire is clearly idealized and in some ways unrealistic. For example, Frodo claims that in all of Shire history, no hobbit has deliberately killed another. (!!!)

But while there are fantasy novels that aim for grimdark realism and moral shades of gray, that's not what The Lord of the Rings is about. It is a book about good versus evil, and you don't find that kind of moral simplicity in the real world. Tolkien knew that. As he wrote to his son Christopher, comparing WWII to his fiction: "Not that in real life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Orcs on our side." (Letter 66)

So this is a deliberate choice. Since the Shire represents what is good – for all that Tolkien pokes fun at its narrow-minded provincialism – he simply elects not to give it the negative characteristics that we might expect to go along with that kind of society. It's his cozy utopia, not an objective depiction of anywhere that ever existed.

 

[Bramblethorn]

If we think that Shire society had well-defined social classes (which I don't), they may have seen it as a semi-formal elevation in rank (much like land grants in feudal England bestowed nobility).

Anyway, a point I wanted to make earlier is that yes, the Shire is clearly idealized and in some ways unrealistic. For example, Frodo claims that in all of Shire history, no hobbit has deliberately killed another. (!!!)

I wonder how accurate Frodo's claim is. There's a scene early in FotR where Miller Sandyman speculates that the "boating accident" death of Frodo's parents was actually murder (she pushed him in, he pulled her in after him). Sandyman is presumably full of it, but it shows that this kind of thing was at least conceivable to hobbits. Later, when Gandalf tells the story of Sméagol and Déagol to Frodo, Gandalf remarks that "it might have happened to others, even to some hobbits that I have known."

And who knows what horrors sleep beneath Sam's vegetable patch?

(ObNickAngel: "Have you never wondered why the crime rate is so low but the accident rate is so high?")

So this is a deliberate choice. Since the Shire represents what is good – for all that Tolkien pokes fun at its narrow-minded provincialism – he simply elects not to give it the negative characteristics that we might expect to go along with that kind of society. It's his cozy utopia, not an objective depiction of anywhere that ever existed.

Also, LotR isn't primarily about the Shire. It's a place that exists to bookend two stories about people who go from comfort and apparent security into danger and hardship to do noble things, and are changed by that experience, and come back to find that they can't just go back to how things used to be.

I think the point of the Shire is not quite utopia - Tolkien gives enough hints of hobbit provincialism, greed and spoon-theft to indicate that it has its share of assholes - but that it's somewhere the hobbit protagonists felt at home, and that it's so different from most of what they experience in the rest of the story.

Was everybody in the Shire happy? Probably not. Did Tolkien claim that they were? Not AFAICT. We're only seeing the Shire as Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, Pippin and Sam experience it, because the story is about them more than it is about the Shire.

 

[StillStunned]

Also, LotR isn't primarily about the Shire. It's a place that exists to bookend two stories about people who go from comfort and apparent security into danger and hardship to do noble things, and are changed by that experience, and come back to find that they can't just go back to how things used to be.

Not only that: in medieval romances, the external setting often reflects the character's internal state of mind. There's an argument to be made that Frodo (and the others) returning home to find their tranquil home turned into a nightmare is Tolkien describing PTSD.

 

[Voboy]

And who knows what horrors sleep beneath Sam's vegetable patch?

Plot bunny: hatched.

Not only that: in medieval romances, the external setting often reflects the character's internal state of mind. There's an argument to be made that Frodo (and the others) returning home to find their tranquil home turned into a nightmare is Tolkien describing PTSD.

Or it's just very typical, good old-fashioned storytelling. The heroic arc often changes the hero; the home they return to is seldom the same. Think of Star Wars: Luke finds a home at the end, but it's not Tatooine. Or the Prydain Chronicles: after Taran leaves Caer Dallben, it is never the same to him again. Nobody seems to find it necessary to claim Lucas or Alexander were resolving their PTSD.

I think there are a dozen possible explanations for the Scouring. It's not necessary that any of them have to do with undiagnosed PTSD for Tolkien.