They (Merry and Pippin, the sons of the aristocratic Tooks and Brandybucks) actually rallied the poor farmers (e.g. the Gamgees and the Cottons) and the middle farmers (e.g. the Maggots) against the kulaks (whatshisface from the southfarthing and the Sackville-Baginses) backed by an invading industrial power (Saruman)
Any “coup” was really the traditional authorities being restored to power by a lower and middle peasant uprising bc it is a fairy tale written by a medievalist who wishes capitalism and industrialism never came about. Principally bc tolkien hated the destruction both have wrought on the natural world and on humans. (And to his credit, he was consistent enough in his hatred for modernity to oppose the whole british imperial project, despise the spread of the english language, refer to british soldiers as orcs, and in The Hobbit imply modern europeans are goblins.)
Idk what you mean by lynching, the book is very explicit that the only deaths were in the battle (+Grima and Saruman), that all who surrendered were let go and that Frodo is constantly trying to get the hobbits to be LESS violent
The Hobbits faded bc hobbits dont exist in 1900s and Tolkien is writing a fairy tale that takes place in the past. Also the “progressive” rule of Saruman was literally an ecocidal human supremacist dictatorship where the only growth industries were policing and exports to the imperial core down south (which, quite explicitly, does not happen under Aragorns kingdom)
Also to reply to your other comment here, the Gamgees arent “slaves”, as Sam’s father recalls (literally the first conversation in the book!) it is a job he got via family connections. In the Shire, gardening is skilled labour. Hamfast is literally called “Master Hamfast” by Bilbo and respected by all for his knowledge of gardening.
Lastly wrt your point about the aristocratic families having power, the books are actually quite explicit that those families have no real coercive power (the only military the shire has is the entire shire raised, there is no coercive apparatus separate from the whole people). In all but aesthetics (which, bc of the hobbit, are locked into a weird mix of neolithic britain and 1870s england), the hobbits are a tribal society only shortly removed from primitive communism / kinship economy
They (Merry and Pippin, the sons of the aristocratic Tooks and Brandybucks) actually rallied the poor farmers (e.g. the Gamgees and the Cottons) and the middle farmers (e.g. the Maggots) against the kulaks (whatshisface from the southfarthing and the Sackville-Baginses)
They rallied their family clients against the class traitors.
Any “coup” was really the traditional authorities being restored to power by a lower and middle peasant uprising bc it is a fairy tale written by a medievalist who wishes capitalism and industrialism never came about.
We were certainly told it was like that, coincidentally in PoV of the instigators. And by “coup” i mean declaring fealty to Reunited Kindgom which i imagine wouldn’t be very popular since hobbits were pretty xenophobic, again it’s the kulaks and their clients.
Idk what you mean by lynching, the book is very explicit that the only deaths were in the battle (+Grima and Saruman), that all who surrendered were let go and that Frodo is constantly trying to get the hobbits to be LESS violent
That’s a literal good tsar syndrome plus swerve, Frodo remains stellar exemplar, his henchmen less so, but the evil dudes are conveniently dying by their own hands or in legit battle.
The Hobbits faded bc hobbits dont exist in 1900s and Tolkien is writing a fairy tale that takes place in the past.
Yes yes just as orcs, elves, dwarves, ents, etc. This is the age of men! Even fucking Howard written this trope better.
Also the “progressive” rule of Saruman was literally an ecocidal human supremacist dictatorship
Swerve
Also to reply to your other comment here, the Gamgees arent “slaves”, as Sam’s father recalls (literally the first conversation in the book!) it is a job he got via family connections.
The family connections of being a serf lol
Lastly wrt your point about the aristocratic families having power, the books are actually quite explicit that those families have no real coercive power (the only military the shire has is the entire shire raised, there is no coercive apparatus separate from the whole people). In all but aesthetics (which, bc of the hobbit, are locked into a weird mix of neolithic britain and 1870s england), the hobbits are a tribal society only shortly removed from primitive communism / kinship economy
Yes because obviously the bucolic idyll portrayed in the book is completely divorced from any material reality.
I get that you take the book on the face value, but i would greatly appreciate that you start your wall of text from that.
I get that you take the book on the face value, but i would greatly appreciate that you start your wall of text from that.
And evidently the extent of your engagement with the book is “the opposite of what the book says must be true” and “the fantastic neolithic shire must fit into the square peg of the rural class structure of the 1920s USSR” which is the laziest possible critique. Like if you’re gonna say “the book is lies (except for what I think is true) and what I say is really what happened in it” just go write ur own fanfic lol
Or yknow, go study history before 1300 instead of mechanically shoving all societies into the same square bourgeois hole
They rallied their family clients against the class traitors.
The wealthy farmers supported by saruman are hardly class-traitors; they are supporting their wealthy class interests against the interests of the poorer farmers
We were certainly told it was like that, coincidentally in PoV of the instigators. And by “coup” i mean declaring fealty to Reunited Kindgom which i imagine wouldn’t be very popular since hobbits were pretty xenophobic, again it’s the kulaks and their clients.
The real coup was Lotho’s takeover and then Saruman’s takeover from him. Fealty to the reunited kingdom is one of the parts of the book i’m not fond of, but again that isn’t a coup, that is the results of a mass peasant uprising against a coup. And you’ve gone within these two sentences from “the book is unreliable we can’t trust it” to “the book says hobbits are xenophobic so this must be true.”
That’s a literal good tsar syndrome plus swerve, Frodo remains stellar exemplar, his henchmen less so, but the evil dudes are conveniently dying by their own hands or in legit battle.
Idk what ‘good tsar syndrome’ or ‘swerve’ mean. Frodo has no henchmen. Saruman dying by wormtongue’s hand is convenient, but then wormtongue is killed by all the hobbits nearby (against frodo’s will, so much for henchmen). Idk why you take issue with the idea that the enemy survivors of the battle were let go? That’s pretty common in battle, especially before the intensification of warfare that happens with the rise of the state and bourgeois society.
Yes yes just as orcs, elves, dwarves, ents, etc. This is the age of men! Even fucking Howard written this trope better.
Idk who Howard is or why you think he’s written it better. Tolkien, for his part, doesn’t portray this as an unambiguously good thing (see e.g. how quickly aragorns kingdom falls into typical feudalism in the appendix as an example), but again he is locked into this ending by his own premise of “the story takes place in the prehistoric past.”
Swerve
Still don’t know what swerve means, saruman still sucks and evidently is no more historically progressive than british rule in india; the hobbits native productive forces were destroyed and confiscated to maximise exports to the imperial core
The family connections of being a serf lol
No one had a more attentive audience than old Ham Gamgee, commonly known as the Gaffer. He held forth at The Ivy Bush, a small inn on the Bywater road; and he spoke with some authority, for he had tended the garden at Bag End for forty years, and had helped old Holman in the same job before that. Now that he was himself growing old and stiff in the joints, the job was mainly carried on by his youngest son, Sam Gamgee.
…
‘I know nothing about jools. Mr. Bilbo is free with his money, and there seems no lack of it; but I know of no tunnel-making. I saw Mr. Bilbo when he came back, a matter of sixty years ago, when I was a lad. I’d not long come ***prentice ***to old Holman (him being my dad’s cousin), but he had me up at Bag End helping him to keep folks from trampling and trapessing all over the garden while the sale was on.
It’s clearly referred to as a job with an apprenticeship and there’s no indication of serfdom or slavery. Again, you are transplanting economic categories from one time and place to another instead of engaging with the text. There are issues with the shire (it is in the beginning stages of forming class society), but there’s no indication that slavery or serfdom is one of them (until, yknow, saruman comes around lol)
Yes because obviously the bucolic idyll portrayed in the book is completely divorced from any material reality.
Not really. The 1870s stuff (umbrellas, rsvp letters, post offices, money) is where it’s divorced from material reality, but the social system (aristocracy without coercive powers), agrarian focus, familial landownership, lack of industry, etc are all fairly decent representations of agrarian tribal societies as they start to differentiate from primitive communism (as you can see in, yknow, Engels or more recent anthropological or historical investigations)
They (Merry and Pippin, the sons of the aristocratic Tooks and Brandybucks) actually rallied the poor farmers (e.g. the Gamgees and the Cottons) and the middle farmers (e.g. the Maggots) against the kulaks (whatshisface from the southfarthing and the Sackville-Baginses) backed by an invading industrial power (Saruman)
Any “coup” was really the traditional authorities being restored to power by a lower and middle peasant uprising bc it is a fairy tale written by a medievalist who wishes capitalism and industrialism never came about. Principally bc tolkien hated the destruction both have wrought on the natural world and on humans. (And to his credit, he was consistent enough in his hatred for modernity to oppose the whole british imperial project, despise the spread of the english language, refer to british soldiers as orcs, and in The Hobbit imply modern europeans are goblins.)
Idk what you mean by lynching, the book is very explicit that the only deaths were in the battle (+Grima and Saruman), that all who surrendered were let go and that Frodo is constantly trying to get the hobbits to be LESS violent
The Hobbits faded bc hobbits dont exist in 1900s and Tolkien is writing a fairy tale that takes place in the past. Also the “progressive” rule of Saruman was literally an ecocidal human supremacist dictatorship where the only growth industries were policing and exports to the imperial core down south (which, quite explicitly, does not happen under Aragorns kingdom)
Also to reply to your other comment here, the Gamgees arent “slaves”, as Sam’s father recalls (literally the first conversation in the book!) it is a job he got via family connections. In the Shire, gardening is skilled labour. Hamfast is literally called “Master Hamfast” by Bilbo and respected by all for his knowledge of gardening.
Lastly wrt your point about the aristocratic families having power, the books are actually quite explicit that those families have no real coercive power (the only military the shire has is the entire shire raised, there is no coercive apparatus separate from the whole people). In all but aesthetics (which, bc of the hobbit, are locked into a weird mix of neolithic britain and 1870s england), the hobbits are a tribal society only shortly removed from primitive communism / kinship economy
They rallied their family clients against the class traitors.
We were certainly told it was like that, coincidentally in PoV of the instigators. And by “coup” i mean declaring fealty to Reunited Kindgom which i imagine wouldn’t be very popular since hobbits were pretty xenophobic, again it’s the kulaks and their clients.
That’s a literal good tsar syndrome plus swerve, Frodo remains stellar exemplar, his henchmen less so, but the evil dudes are conveniently dying by their own hands or in legit battle.
Yes yes just as orcs, elves, dwarves, ents, etc. This is the age of men! Even fucking Howard written this trope better.
Swerve
The family connections of being a serf lol
Yes because obviously the bucolic idyll portrayed in the book is completely divorced from any material reality.
I get that you take the book on the face value, but i would greatly appreciate that you start your wall of text from that.
And evidently the extent of your engagement with the book is “the opposite of what the book says must be true” and “the fantastic neolithic shire must fit into the square peg of the rural class structure of the 1920s USSR” which is the laziest possible critique. Like if you’re gonna say “the book is lies (except for what I think is true) and what I say is really what happened in it” just go write ur own fanfic lol
Or yknow, go study history before 1300 instead of mechanically shoving all societies into the same square bourgeois hole
The wealthy farmers supported by saruman are hardly class-traitors; they are supporting their wealthy class interests against the interests of the poorer farmers
The real coup was Lotho’s takeover and then Saruman’s takeover from him. Fealty to the reunited kingdom is one of the parts of the book i’m not fond of, but again that isn’t a coup, that is the results of a mass peasant uprising against a coup. And you’ve gone within these two sentences from “the book is unreliable we can’t trust it” to “the book says hobbits are xenophobic so this must be true.”
Idk what ‘good tsar syndrome’ or ‘swerve’ mean. Frodo has no henchmen. Saruman dying by wormtongue’s hand is convenient, but then wormtongue is killed by all the hobbits nearby (against frodo’s will, so much for henchmen). Idk why you take issue with the idea that the enemy survivors of the battle were let go? That’s pretty common in battle, especially before the intensification of warfare that happens with the rise of the state and bourgeois society.
Idk who Howard is or why you think he’s written it better. Tolkien, for his part, doesn’t portray this as an unambiguously good thing (see e.g. how quickly aragorns kingdom falls into typical feudalism in the appendix as an example), but again he is locked into this ending by his own premise of “the story takes place in the prehistoric past.”
Still don’t know what swerve means, saruman still sucks and evidently is no more historically progressive than british rule in india; the hobbits native productive forces were destroyed and confiscated to maximise exports to the imperial core
It’s clearly referred to as a job with an apprenticeship and there’s no indication of serfdom or slavery. Again, you are transplanting economic categories from one time and place to another instead of engaging with the text. There are issues with the shire (it is in the beginning stages of forming class society), but there’s no indication that slavery or serfdom is one of them (until, yknow, saruman comes around lol)
Not really. The 1870s stuff (umbrellas, rsvp letters, post offices, money) is where it’s divorced from material reality, but the social system (aristocracy without coercive powers), agrarian focus, familial landownership, lack of industry, etc are all fairly decent representations of agrarian tribal societies as they start to differentiate from primitive communism (as you can see in, yknow, Engels or more recent anthropological or historical investigations)