How halfling society works

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I wasn't sure which forum to put this in, but this is technically about the Lord of the Rings books.

I came across this interesting blog post, The Moral Economy of the Shire, which feels eminently yoinkable for games and helps differentiate halfling society from those of humans, elves and dwarves in RPGs. (I would probably have gnomish society organized in a similar fashion, but I've always been more interested in what are now called forest gnomes than I am rock gnomes.)

A lot of this may be old news to British posters who are more familiar with the real-world influences Tolkien incorporated into his works.

There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and because I am the way that I am, every time I see it, it makes me start thinking. “Are there taxes in the Shire? If not, how does the government function? Are there worries? Does the lack of taxes relate to the lack of worries? How do people think a whole economic system built around drinking and pipe-smoking even works?” Luckily, I think there are answers to this. Tolkien does not describe the political economy of the Hobbits in any detail, because it’s rarely relevant to the story, but I think we can learn a lot about it from what he does mention. In Tolkien’s legendarium, the Shire is built out an idealized version of rural English society. By looking at how he depicts this–and what eventually happens to it–we can learn a lot about how these sorts of societies function and change over time, and what the benefits and drawbacks of living life Hobbit-style really are.

The implication in both books and movies is that most Hobbits spent their time either farming or enjoying leisure time, but this makes little sense, when one considers what we know about premodern agriculture and what little of life and culture in the Shire. This could describe a pure subsistence economy, based around producing just enough food to ensure survival, and some of the text seems to suggest that, but it’s clear that that can’t be true. The Shire has a well-developed economy, with mills, full-time craftsmen, inns, and the large-scale cultivation of luxury crops, despite having almost no foreign trade (Southfarthing pipe-weed being found as far away as Isengard is taken as proof of Saruman’s meddling) or industry. Premodern agriculture was characterized primarily as being low-surplus and high-labor, it takes a lot of people a lot of time to produce enough food for everyone to eat, and there’s rarely much left over. How does this jibe with the leisurely lives of simple pleasure that our Hobbit heroes seem to enjoy?

There’s actually a very obvious answer, which is that our protagonists aren’t typical Hobbits. Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin are all very clearly members of the landed gentry, the landowning class that controls most means of economic production and maintains social dominance over the Shire. This isn’t really extrapolation or interpretation, it’s more-or-less text, and I suspect the only reason it’s not spelled out is because Tolkien assumed any reader would understand that intuitively. Bilbo and Frodo are both gentlemen of leisure because the Baggins family is independently wealthy, and that wealth almost has to come from land ownership, because there isn’t enough industry or trade to sustain it. They can afford to go on adventures and study Elven poetry because they draw their income from tenant farmers renting their land. Merry and Pippin are from an even higher social tier; both are the heirs to powerful families that hold quasi-feudal offices (the Master of Buckland, for the Brandybucks, and the Thain, for the Tooks).

As I said before, this is the traditional system of social organization in the English countryside, sometimes known as “squirearchy”. The gentry, in this paradigm, aren’t nobility–they don’t have a distinct set of legal privileges. Serfdom, or other forms of labor bound to the land, doesn’t seem to exist, and there’s no evidence of military vassalage as an organizing principle. Instead, we can see that a relatively small number of families owns much of the land, and much of the agricultural capital–mills, granaries, oxen, plows, etc–allowing them to wield a high level of informal economic and social control over their community. Most other Hobbits would either be tenant farmers, paying most of their produce back to their landlords in rents, or yeomen, independent small farmers who owned their own land, but were still dependent on the gentry in many respects. We can see a small, burgeoning urban bourgeois emerging in the small towns and villages, perhaps, but without foreign trade or industrialization, this can’t grow to challenge the gentry, and no proletariat is likely to exist yet.

This is a society organized around family and clan dynamics, where power flows not from the office, but from who you know, and the web of favors, debts, and relationships you can call upon. The Tooks are not powerful because they hold the Thainship, they hold the Thainship as a signifier of being “the first family” of the Shire, in terms of wealth and influence. The Mayor of Michel Delving’s main job is to preside over banquets because, in a political structure like this, those sort of social events are where everything is actually decided and established, in the subtle, informal relationships between the families who own everything. There’s no bureaucracy or administrative apparatus because there is no need for one. The Shire is not conducting war or diplomacy or trade, and isn’t administering large populations of subjects, and there would be no reason for the Oldbucks, Brandybucks, Tooks, etc to support the kind of centralization of state power that could challenge their informal reign.

The Gamgees are likely tenants of the Baggins, or at least dependent on them for access to agricultural capital. They likely send much of their income up to Bag End in rent, and provide services, as gardeners, batmen, valets, traveling companions, etc. They also provide support, in a social and civic sense, as we see. If Frodo had gone to the Free Fair to run for Mayor, the Gamgees and other tenants would have voted for him, and would have accompanied him in public, to demonstrate his status and prestige. But in return for this, they could expect generous gifts on holidays, loans of money on favorable terms, lax enforcement of rental arrears in time of drought and famine, and legal support in disputes.

Peasant households should not be seen as small businesses, trying to maximize their annual profits, but as people trying to survive. A single failed harvest could mean death, and in this situation, the patronage networks were a vital social safety net. A peasant in this system gave most of his income to his landlord, without fail, but he could trust that in case of disaster, he would have some recourse.

 

[Scribe]

Yoinked indeed.

 

[Osgood]

Interesting. But why don’t we know more about hobbit economics, politics, and social structure? Given the excruciating detail of the appendices, I would expect to see a complete copy of the Shire’s tax code, in Hobbitish, for the fiscal third age in there!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Interesting. But why don’t we know more about hobbit economics, politics, and social structure? Given the excruciating detail of the appendices, I would expect to see a complete copy of the Shire’s tax code, in Hobbitish, for the fiscal third age in there!

All the hardcore tax code nerds are into Star Wars.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I'm pretty sure that Hobbit society is a Darwinian nightmare, all about survival of the fattest.

 

[Tonguez]

Yes, squireage is indeed the system I always envisaged as applying to the Shire, it's very much traditional Midlands/South England - indeed JRR Tolkien himself says he based the Shire on his memories of Warwickshire.
I think people dont realise just how ingrained classism and the gentry was in British culture, at least before WW2.
One of my fathers cousins married the son of a British Earl. We often sat in shock, appalled by the stories they would tell of the disfunctional interactions between the 'manor' and the 'village' and how it was all tolerated as part of polite society.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I wasn't sure which forum to put this in, but this is technically about the Lord of the Rings books. I came across this interesting blog post, The Moral Economy of the Shire, which feels eminently yoinkable for games and helps differentiate halfling society from those of humans, elves and dwarves in RPGs. (I would probably have gnomish society organized in a similar fashion, but I've always been more interested in what are now called forest gnomes than I am rock gnomes.)

(A lot of this may be old news to British posters who are more familiar with the real-world influences Tolkien incorporated into his works.)

The article is good - and yeah a key thing to note is that shire/hobbit society is all idealized and very much in line with Tolkien's political views, which held anti-industrial
rural utopian anarchism as the "best" and a sort of "well-meaning non-interfering monarchy" as second-best. So the likely negative elements are played down, which is fine, because it's fantasy, albeit it can make one wonder exactly how it works.

Another quote from the article which stood out for me:

We’re told repeatedly that gift-giving and hosting feasts are two of the primary preoccupations of Hobbits. To modern ears, this may come across as utopian, or idyllic, but these sorts of status displays were a key part of many economic and social systems. In many Pacific Northwest Native American tribes, this was known as “potlatch“, and served as both a political and economic system, in which conspicuous displays of generosity were used to denote power and prestige.

This is of note to me because it's been observed before that quite a few characteristics of the hobbits match up weirdly well with Native American mythology and societies. I've got an entire academic book on it somewhere (which I admit I haven't properly read, I should!), we know Tolkien had some significant awareness of that stuff through his work and studies.

So I think it's sometimes worth seeing hobbits as like rural English idyll aesthetic 100% but with some interestingly Native American vibes culturally.

 

[Aeson]

I'm pretty sure that Hobbit society is a Darwinian nightmare, all about survival of the fattest.

I get the joke. Yet, I hope you understand fittest doesn't always mean physically fit. Propagating this fallacy isn't helpful.

 

[Scribe]

So I think it's sometimes worth seeing hobbits as like rural English idyll aesthetic 100% but with some interestingly Native American vibes culturally.

Which honestly is a pretty idealized kind of world view, potentially. Not something I've thought of before.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I get the joke. Yet, I hope you understand fittest doesn't always mean physically fit. Propagating this fallacy isn't helpful.

It all goes back to bloody Alfred Russel Wallace's fault, who borrowed the phrase from an ill-conceived economic theory book by Herbert Spencer, a man who had a lot of bad ideas (Spencer's book was itself inspired by by a very superficial understanding of Darwin), and Wallace managed to convince Darwin to use it because Wallace was being a pedant about the term Natural Selection. Darwin understood "survival of the fittest" to mean "the best adapted to local conditions", which was not at all the way it was used in the economics book nor at all by the press nor by other authors, hence the misapprehension was spread.