Back to the Future

The nostalgic yet progressive appeal of wizards, hobbits, and Jedi knights

Michael Valdez Moses from the July 2003 issue

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By contrast, Saruman "has a mind of metal and wheels" and "does not care for growing things." Jackson's films emphasize the hellish atmosphere of Isengard, where Saruman's orcs clear-cut the forest and ravish the landscape in order to build what amounts to an enormous munitions factory. Fittingly, the Ents destroy Isengard by unleashing the river dammed up by Saruman's forces.

Of course, the free peoples of Middle Earth are not entirely immune to the lure of technology, industrialism, and the modern project. The dwarves have proved too relentless and rapacious in their pursuit of mithril, the precious silver they mine from under the Mountains of Moria. In the course of their ambitious building and tunneling they have awakened the Balrog, an evil creature who engages Gandalf in mortal combat. The wizard draws a moral from the misfortune of the dwarves: "Even as mithril was the foundation of their wealth, so also it was their destruction: they delved greedily and too deep, and disturbed that from which they fled, Durin's Bane."

Although the Shire does not provide much of an arena for high adventure or personal ambition, and although its village customs can seem stifling, its deep attraction becomes apparent to Frodo after he leaves its confines. Until the onset of the War of the Ring, the Shire largely escaped the great political struggles. Its relative obscurity and isolation -- most in Middle Earth have never heard of hobbits -- is a measure of its political independence. The hobbits know only a very loose and undemanding form of local self-government. In this respect, Tolkien's much-vaunted medievalism (he was a prominent scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literatures at Oxford) seems consonant with certain 19th-century theories of the origins of English liberty.

For Tolkien, as for other Victorian defenders of the medieval English past, the premodern period of loose and competing feudal political relations and independent townships gave birth to modern English political and personal freedoms. An epoch of weak monarchs, locally based political authorities, and intersecting and sometimes conflicting ties to church, local landholder, township, guild, and king was more conducive to personal liberty than was a later, apparently more uniform and "progressive" era of strong centralized government, universal suffrage, and mass politics. In any case, when Frodo and his companions return to the Shire after the destruction of Sauron, they find that the traditional "medieval" world of village life has changed for the worse.

In the adventurers' absence, the Shire has fallen under the dominion of Saruman. Prosperity has been replaced by shortages and rationing. Personal property is seized by the new government for the sake of "fair distribution," though most of these goods end up in the hands of corrupt officials. Old family homes have been destroyed to make way for shabbier public housing. The old mill has been replaced by several larger ones that are "always a-hammering and a-letting out a smoke and a stench." Beautiful old trees have been cut down and the river polluted. Political corruption is rampant, as is physical intimidation by newly established public officials. Most significantly, the personal liberties of the hobbits have been sharply curtailed under an intrusive and alien form of government. As old Farmer Cotton puts it, "everything except Rules got shorter and shorter."

One of Frodo's exasperated companions proclaims, "This is worse than Mordor!" In fact, as the critic Shippey has astutely noted, Tolkien's postwar Shire, much like Orwell's Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four, most closely resembles postwar Britain under the Labour government of the mid- and late 1940s.

In Tolkien's fantasy, Frodo and his friends manage to restore the old village life of the Shire, though the expulsion of Saruman and his cronies requires a pitched battle in which several hobbits lose their lives. Afterward, the fate of the Shire mirrors that of the rest of Middle Earth. Frodo's only memorable political act as deputy mayor is to "reduce the Shirriffs to their proper functions and numbers."

Restored to the throne of Gondor, Aragorn frees the slaves of Mordor and restores to the wild men of the Forests of Druadan (his former allies against Mordor) their lands and political independence. Given the late imperial context in which Tolkien completed his trilogy, Aragorn's magnanimity hints at the necessity of extending liberty not only to those abject souls formerly enslaved by totalitarian regimes but also to "primitive" and politically subject peoples (i.e., colonized nations) more generally. Most significantly, Aragorn issues an edict that makes the Shire "a free Land under the protection of the Northern Sceptre." The hobbits of the Shire are guaranteed the right to elect their own mayors, run their own farms and small businesses, carry on their trade, and govern their own communities as they deem fit.

But this restoration of the traditional way of life is haunted by a pervasive sense of historical finitude. The rebirth of the Shire takes place against a grand historical narrative that witnesses the decline and fall of the great civilization of the elves in Middle Earth and the gradual and inevitable loss of their magical influence on the lives of men, dwarves, and hobbits. Like postwar Britain, the Shire survives, but only in diminished form, the quaint and picturesque relic of a once-glorious Elvish past that shall come no more. The Shire serves chiefly as a holiday stop for old wizards and displaced elves who indulge in one final nostalgic visit before heading "to the West" and to oblivion.

Tolkien's epic narrative turns on a single, stark moral choice: Those who would defeat Mordor must themselves refuse the Ring of Power. The great temptation for the books' and films' heroes is to believe that they can command that Ring for good. Tolkien's fantasy is deeply conservative insofar as this moral choice implies a rejection of the modern project: To preserve the good life, men must relinquish their efforts to acquire power, particularly technological and economic power over nature, for their own ends. But if Tolkien's Luddite fantasy is consonant with anti-modern environmentalism, it also embodies a desire for political liberties and personal freedoms increasingly imperiled by the expanded authority of modern nation-states, which is itself supported by many environmentalists through instruments such as the Kyoto protocols.

Mr. Butterbur, an innkeeper in Tolkien's trilogy, speaks for many lovers of fantasy, hobbit and human alike, when he expresses a deeply felt if often frustrated desire: "We want to be let alone." And yet the desire to be left alone, at least for the great majority of readers and viewers of contemporary science fiction and fantasy, is often inextricably combined with a contrary desire to arrange the future for the better, to direct the lives and welfare of others, if only generations yet to be born. The deepest utopian appeal of The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter is not to an adolescent yearning for a world inhabited by wizards, hobbits, and Jedi knights, but to a modern consciousness torn by mutually contradictory desires. In divine fashion we would redesign the entire cosmos according to our individual whims and throw off the chains of all external authority. We wish at once to be free and to be a god to others. We would return to an idyllic past and progress forward to an unbounded future. The truly magical power of these films and stories is that they allow us, if only for the brief moment in which we are enthralled by their spell, to believe that as modern individuals we can be both at home in the world and at one with ourselves.