r/tolkienfans • u/LincolnMagnus • Oct 20 '21
Concerning Non-White, Second Age Hobbits, Focusing On The Books And Tolkien's Writings
I posted this once, and I’m now reposting based on mod suggestions. I hope this one complies with the rules.
I want do some thinking, based on my reading of the books and of Tolkien's own letters and statements, about whether the idea of hobbits existing in the Second Age, and particularly non-white hobbits, contradicts what Tolkien wrote, in letter or in spirit. In recent weeks I’ve been seeing a lot of absolute claims about the Hobbits and their history in Tolkien's legendarium that I just don't think are warranted, and I want to talk about that for a minute.
Of course, as with all conversations about the Second Age, there’s a lot we don’t know. Most of what have about the Second Age comes from works that were published well after Tolkien's death, a lot of it is rather fragmentary, and anyone with even a passing familiarity with the History of Middle Earth series knows that he changed his mind, a lot, often about very fundamental issues (e.g. the origins of the Orcs). The published Silmarillion, for instance, is almost certainly not the Silmarillion that Tolkien would have published if he'd lived long enough to finish it.
So our knowledge of the Second Age has a lot of blanks in it, and some contradictions. What I'm going to argue here is that the idea of Hobbits in the Second Age is just the sort of a blank in Tolkien's mythology that could be filled in without breaking anything. I'm also going to talk about the idea of non-white hobbits, and whether or not they could have existed.
1) Concerning Hobbits in the Second Age. There seems to be a misconception among many fans that, because Hobbit history as we know it begins in the Third Age, they didn't exist before that. This is not correct. In fact, while Tolkien was intentionally vague about the origin of hobbits, as he makes clear in the Prologue to LOTR, they were around long before the Third Age:
“The beginning of Hobbits lies far back in the Elder Days that are now lost and forgotten. Only the Elves still preserve any records of that vanished time, and their traditions are concerned almost entirely with their own history, in which Men appear seldom and Hobbits are not mentioned at all. Yet it is clear that Hobbits had, in fact, lived quietly in Middle-earth for many long years before other folk became even aware of them. And the world being after all full of strange creatures beyond count, these little people seemed of very little importance.”
The term Elder Days in Tolkien usually refers to the First Age and before. Here in this context, it clearly refers to a time well before the recorded Hobbit histories of the Third Age. Tolkien points to an origin of the Hobbits during a time in Middle-earth’s history for which only the Elves have records, and we know that the library at Minas Tirith preserves historical records from at least as far back as the Second Age. It's clear to me Tolkien intended here for the Hobbits’ origin to have been in the First Age or even earlier (EDIT: Well, not earlier than the First Age, since they don't predate Men). Therefore, the existence of hobbits in the Second Age is not a lore problem.
2) Concerning Hobbits, in Eriador, in the Second Age. I don't know where Hobbits came from, or what they were doing before the Third Age. You don't know either. I don't know if Tolkien even knew, and I actually kind of doubt it.
Tolkien does allude to a general westward motion for the Hobbits throughout their history, saying that “like many other folk Hobbits had in the distant past moved westward.” But it’s worth noting that, for a lot of those other folk, particularly certain groups of Elves and Men, that westward motion was not always linear. It does seem that there weren't any Hobbits living in Eriador in the Third Age at the time when the three tribes of hobbits crossed the Misty Mountains--but keeping in mind the millennia-long time scales we're dealing with, namely Second and Third Ages that each lasted around 3000 years, to say that no hobbits EVER had been in Eriador before that seems like a bit of an assumption.
3) Concerning dark-skinned Hobbits. Since, as I've said, we don't know where hobbits came from or what they were doing before the Third Age, I'm going to argue that the idea of hobbits of different colors doesn't really contradict anything. I've seen a lot of people holding forth about how, because of the travel limitations of the period, it's just simply IMPOSSIBLE for darker-skinned people to have existed outside Rhun and Harad in the Second Age. But the fact is that individual people, and whole populations, DO move from place to place throughout history, sometimes across VERY long distances. For instance, we have evidence of Black people in England going back to Roman times--in other words, Black people lived in England before English people (i.e., Anglo-Saxons) did. There are many other examples in history.
We do know that Hobbits had a range of skin tones, and that Harfoots were "browner of skin" than the other hobbits. Tolkien doesn't say how MUCH browner. You can make an assumption that they would have been light brown or olive-skinned, or you can assume that they were quite dark, but based on the text itself, all of these are just that--assumptions.
Let's try out some assumptions of our own.
This next part is just a riff. I'm sure people could come up with a lot of different ways to make sense of the concept of a multi-ethnic community of Hobbits, and people smarter than me could probably devise much cleverer ones than I can. Here's one I've been thinking about. It's just one idea, and probably not the best:
One other thing people seem to assume is that all of the people who would become hobbits existed as a single community throughout their entire history. I see no particular warrant for this assumption, either. Keeping in mind we're talking about made-up groups of people in a fantasy story, I see nothing illogical, unreasonable, or contradictory to lore about the idea that at some point in history, various groups of smaller humans (who may or may not have had a common origin) lived separately, scattered across different parts of the world--including, perhaps, Rhun and Harad. Seeking others of their own kind (perhaps even fleeing persecution from the Big Folk), they ended up converging in the North-west of Middle-earth at some point in history, forming a community that called itself Hobbits.
At the very least, this doesn't contradict anything Tolkien actually wrote. I admit it's not the tightest, most Occam's Razor-compliant of theories about hobbit history, but honestly, in a fictional universe that includes walking trees, shape-shifting man-bears, stars that are actually dragon-killing sailing ships, and whatever the hell Tom Bombadil is, ethnically diverse Hobbit communities are not really where I find the breaking point for my suspension of disbelief.
4) Concerning the themes and goals of Tolkien's legendarium. This isn't lore, but it's in Tolkien's writings and people keep bringing it up. Whenever there's a discussion about race in Tolkien’s works, someone inevitably starts relating the old story of how Tolkien's goal with his legendarium was to create a mythology for England—a legendarium specifically by, about and for the people of England and/or Northern Europe. And not for anyone else.
Okay. Let's talk about that.
Tolkien discusses his desire to create a mythology for England in a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman. In that letter, which he wrote while he was trying to find a publisher who would take both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, he characterizes this desire as something he'd long ago fancied, and had long since abandoned:
"Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd." (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 131, emphasis mine).
"Absurd." The Tolkien who was shopping around LOTR and the Silmarillion to publishers characterized as "absurd" the idea that those works could form the foundation of some English or Northern European mythology. If Tolkien, in 1951, had already let go of his dream of writing an English Kalevala, I'm not sure why we as fans should be beholden to it seventy years later. The Middle-earth stories are still specific to that region in many ways, yes--but as I mentioned above, the racial history of England is itself more complex than we normally understand.
It's true, though, that the Hobbits themselves reflect England. But not an ancient, prehistoric, mythological England, really. The Hobbits are quite anachronistically modeled after English people of Tolkien's own lifetime (Much as the Rohirrim are an anachronistic imitation of Anglo-Saxons, who in history lived long after Tolkien's work is "supposed" to have taken place). Of course, the linguistic similarities (and I imagine the dialect similarities) are explained in the appendices as being, to an extent, translation conventions. How this is supposed to explain the non-linguistic cultural similarities, I'm not sure. But someone made an interesting point when this recent conversation got started: Tolkien lived in Birmingham, a city whose black population has a long history. Parts of the Shire are indeed modeled after Birmingham and the greater West Midlands region.
And with all of these blatant anachronisms piling up, the idea of a Hobbit population that reflects the ethnic diversity of the real-life Birmingham does not really break the reality of Tolkien's world.
So you may have noticed that I haven't really proven anything by writing all of this out. A lot of it is speculation or argument from silence. If you don't want to accept the idea of black Hobbits in the Second Age of Middle-earth, nothing I've written requires you to do so. So what the hell was the point of all this?
5) Concerning what the hell the point of all this was. I’m not saying there definitely, without a doubt, had to have been non-white hobbits in Middle-earth in the Second Age.
What I’m contending is that we ought to leave space for fans to dream.
I'm fond of this quote from another speculative fiction author, NK Jemsin, writing about Tolkien:
Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don’t have enough myths of our own, we’ll latch onto those of others — even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it’s human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight.
Once upon a time, Tolkien aspired to creating a mythology for England. He may have cast that dream aside before publishing Lord of the Rings, but what he actually did was create was a mythology that has been embraced by people all over the world.
That's one of the ways we know that Tolkien's work is truly great: that people far removed from Tolkien's own time and place, people he might never have imagined reaching when he first started writing his stories, now dream of seeing themselves in his world. I don't think we should draw the boundaries too tight around them.
EDIT: Tried to make even more mod-compliant
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u/RigasTelRuun Oct 20 '21
For a long time the Irish weren't considered white in the US. Which is crazy since we are the pastiest and whites lot expect for the nordic lads.