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1
SHIRE FOLK
In November 1949 Major Warren Lewis, brother of C. S. Lewis, wrote what was probably the first ever review of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings. The manuscript he had read was in an inchoate state. It did not even have a title. But this ‘New Hobbit’, the long-awaited sequel to Tolkien’s 1937 children’s story of that name, had captivated Lewis immediately. ‘Golly, what a book! The inexhaustible fertility of the man’s imagination amazes me,’ Lewis enthused in his diary. He was struck by Tolkien’s mastery of description, his poignant characterisations and the unflagging energy of the narrative. This, he felt, was ‘a great book of its kind’.
Lewis wondered, though, if critics would interpret The Lord of the Rings as a political satire about contemporary Europe, rather than as the timeless mythopoeic fantasy that Tolkien had intended to write. ‘By accident, a great deal of it can be read topically,’ Lewis thought, ‘the Shire standing for England, Rohan for France, Gondor the Germany of the future, Sauron for Stalin.’ He even wondered if the ‘egregious’ Lewis Silkin, the minister of town and country planning in Clement Attlee’s Labour government, would be identified as the vandal wizard Saruman, destroyer of the novel’s pastoral idyll, the Shire.
None of this would have pleased Tolkien. In 1965, in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, he explicitly rejected the idea that his story was intended as an allegory of any historical event, most of all the recent great war against Nazism. ‘The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion,’ Tolkien insisted. Even so, for all such protestations, Lewis had clearly been on to something back in 1949. He had realised that Tolkien’s future audience was going to see associations between events in Middle Earth and those in their own world. But then Tolkien himself, in his 1965 foreword, conceded that the absence of any deliberately embedded allegory did not preclude his readers’ right to interpret the text as they saw fit. The Lord of the Rings might not serve as an allegory. But it had what he called ‘applicability’.
Tolkien had, after all, never made any secret of the fact that the Shire, the setting of the first four and final two chapters of The Lord of the Rings, was modelled on the rural Warwickshire he half-remembered from his childhood in the 1890s. Even the Shire’s location, on the north-western edge of Middle Earth, correlated with the usual placement of the British Isles on the map of Europe. The Shire, with its drystone walls, hay wains, country alehouses and sheriff s, was an affectionate parody of the pre-industrial ‘Deep England’ already central to conservative (especially Catholic conservative) conceptions of English identity at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the writings of authors such as G. K. Chesterton, H. J. Massingham and H. V. Morton.
And the Shire’s diminutive inhabitants, hobbits – ‘charming, absurd, helpless hobbits’, as Gandalf the Wizard calls them – corresponded very neatly with the gentle and unassuming self-image that the English people had adopted for themselves in the years after the First World War. They had not always seen themselves as such meek creatures. The brash, bumptious ogre John Bull, the personification of English virtues who had symbolised the age of High Britannic Imperialism and gunboat diplomacy, was no hobbit. But, after the slaughter of the Western Front, the English were weary of John Bull’s aggressive theatricality. Now they saw themselves exemplified by the ‘Little Man’ – ‘small, kindly, bewildered, modest, obstinate, and very loveable’, as the writer and MP Harold Nicolson described him, and most famously depicted by the cartoonist Sidney Strube, in the Daily Express, with bowler hat, umbrella, bow tie, high collar, pince-nez glasses and bushy white moustache. Strube’s Little Man offered an Englishman for a new, milder, altogether more quotidian age.
Writing in 1934, the conservative historian Arthur Bryant argued that this modern Little Englishman was a ‘stolid, tolerant, good-humoured, reliable kind of person, so strong withal (because he is so much at peace with himself ) so gentle’. W. R. Inge, a former dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, said of him that he was ‘humane; cruelty excites him to violent indignation. He is a bad hater, and has a short memory for injuries.’ His chief vices were intemperance (‘in eating more than drinking’) and a ‘disinclination for hard and steady work’. But he made up for these faults by ‘a peculiar sense of humour […] preserving him from fierce and cruel fanaticisms’. Tolkien, writing a few years later, would describe his hobbits as ‘an unobtrusive but very ancient people’ who loved ‘peace and quiet and good tilled earth’, whose faces ‘were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful, broad, bright-eyed, red-cheeked’ and who found pleasure mainly in ‘eating and drinking’ and ‘simple jests’. Clearly, the English were the close cousins of these artless, introverted and complacent people of the Shire.
Too complacent, perhaps. Tolkien’s affection for his hobbits was unreserved. But The Lord of the Rings can be understood, among other things, as a warning about the dangers of languorous detachment from the evils of the world. Frodo Baggins, the novel’s protagonist, is, like all hobbits, a confirmed believer in Splendid Isolation at the beginning of Tolkien’s story. Frodo’s initial preference is to turn away from the threat emerging from Mordor rather than openly to confront it: to hide away the dangerous magical ring that he possesses, to speak nothing of it and to hope that the storm will pass by his sleepy homeland and that better times will follow. Gandalf, frustrated at this guileless wishful thinking, must chivvy him into action, force Frodo to accept that, whether he likes it or not, the destructive forces that threaten to overwhelm Middle Earth will not spare the Shire simply because it appears harmless.
Whether Tolkien recognised these parallels with the conflict against Nazi Germany is unclear. As a pessimistic cultural conservative, he had a complex attitude towards the Second World War. He was ambivalent about its outcome. He felt that it had been fought with a machine-age ugliness that would in time merely ‘breed new Saurons, and slowly turn men and elves into orcs’. His political views had never been straightforward. During the Munich crisis in 1938, Tolkien expressed more suspicion of atheistic Russia than of Germany. Despite his origins in colonial South Africa, he was a Little Englander who had no interest in fighting to defend a British Empire he abhorred. But his personal detestation of Hitler – in part because of the violence the Nazi leader had done to the reputation of northern European mythology – was persistent and sincere.
From its first publication in 1954 The Lord of the Rings was interpreted by many of its readers as a warning about the perils of good people failing to act in the face of a malign existential threat. After all, how could a British audience that had lived through the Appeasement era of the 1930s and the terrible events that followed it not find in Tolkien’s story something uncannily familiar? Here was a tale about the people of a small and peripheral land, happy in their isolation and primitive democracy, perhaps a little too incurious about events beyond their frontiers, suddenly being faced with a monstrous, militaristic terror from the east, one that they had previously overlooked or else dismissed as none of their concern. A terror to which they would only respond at the last moment; a terror which, as a result, came very close to sweeping away their gentle, parochial civilisation once and for all, and which they were ultimately able to triumph over only because of their unassuming strength of character. To the readers of the 1950s, the applicability of this story to the events of Munich, Dunkirk and the Blitz must have seemed to jump off the page.
By 1954, Tolkien’s story was one the British had told themselves about the Second World War many times over already. As early as the winter of 1939, in his Penguin Special paperback Why Britain Is at War, Harold Nicolson had insisted that ‘the British people are by nature peaceful and kindly’, a nation of hobbits who
desire nothing on Earth except to retain their liberties, to enjoy their pleasures, and to go about their business in a tranquil frame of mind. They have no ambition for honour and glory, and they regard wars, and even victories, as silly, ugly, wasteful things. They are not either warriors or heroes until they are forced to; they are sensible and gentle men and women.
‘Somewhat indolent by temperament’, this ‘sleepy, decent and most pacific race’ had regrettably ignored Nazi Germany’s ambitions for too long, Nicolson admitted, for ‘only by dire necessity’ could they ever be ‘stirred to do unpleasant things’. But in the end they had been provoked once too often. Hitler, Nicolson declared, would now discover to his cost the conviction and tenacity of the mild-mannered islanders whom he had so rashly underestimated.
Why Britain Is at War was published in the sleepy first months of the conflict. In June 1940, when the Allied armies on the continent collapsed in the face of the German Blitzkrieg, France fell and Britain seemed on the brink of invasion and defeat, the left -wing novelist J. B. Priestley mobilised the same myth to even more influential effect in his series of ‘Postscript’ broadcasts on the BBC. Priestley described to his listeners how the ‘kindness, humour and courage’ of the British people would inevitably overcome the ‘half-crazy, haunted, fearful minds’ set against them. Most famously, he drew on the story of the commercial paddle-steamers conscripted into service to rescue the troops trapped on the Dunkirk beaches as a way of epitomising what the war was about, and how it would be won. It was a war, Priestley declared, of people from an ‘innocent foolish world’ of pork pies and sandcastles, Pierrots and amusement arcades, who had found themselves pitted against madness and machine-age tyranny; of civilians performing feats of unexpected courage ‘so absurd and yet so grand and gallant that you hardly know whether to laugh or to cry when you read about them’.
Priestley did more than just rally a confused and frightened nation in June 1940. He helped to teach the British how to understand what was happening to them as a ‘People’s War’ of humble, essentially civilian-minded heroes like the Little Man depicted by Strube. His version of Dunkirk was one of ‘little ships’ crewed by stout-hearted amateurs saving their country’s army when all else had failed, rather than the professional Royal Navy, which actually rescued most of the trapped soldiers. Priestley’s influence is undiminished eighty years later. Christopher Nolan’s 2017 blockbuster Dunkirk is basically one of Priestley’s Postscripts illustrated with twenty first-century special effects. Its central character is not some brawny uniformed Achilles but the mild-mannered, middle-class, middle-aged Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance), the skipper of a diminutive pleasure yacht, a Dorset Frodo sailing into battle in knitted pullover, armed with nothing more martial than a hot, sweet cup of tea.
What writers such as Nicolson and Priestley had begun, Winston Churchill continued and confirmed in his six-volume The Second World War, a history which, after its completion in 1954 (the same year that the first volume of The Lord of the Rings was published), would become the most influential narrative of the conflict in the English-speaking world. The moral Churchill offers for Britain’s war is of a Shire Folk almost undone ‘through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature’ in allowing Hitler to rearm and conquer the West. Churchill cast himself in the early chapters of his first volume, The Gathering Storm, published in 1948, as a Gandalfi an seer whose warnings about the threat from Germany in the 1930s had been ignored almost until it was too late. ‘Poor England! Leading her free, careless life from day to day [… behaving] as though all the world was as easy, uncalculating, and well-meaning as herself.’
What made the Shire Folk narrative so persuasive to the British, whether it was told by a man of the left such as Priestley or a conservative patriarch like Churchill, was that it explained the nation’s early wartime failures, as well its subsequent successes. Those failures and successes were products of the same unchanging national characteristics. The British had been gulled into almost catastrophic carelessness in the 1930s by the cunning of their enemies. But what the Germans, in their hubris, had failed to guess at were the inner reserves of fortitude such a modest island race possessed – a stubborn unwillingness to be bullied, and an indomitable pluck even in the face of as grotesque and triumphant a Moloch as Hitler. The Shire Folk, it turned out, were a people of brilliant ‘muddlers-through’, inspired amateurs in an emergency:
Ease and peace had left this people still curiously tough. They were, if it came to it, difficult to daunt or to kill; and they were, perhaps, so unwearyingly fond of good things not least because they could, when put to it, do without them, and could survive rough handling […] in a way that astonished those who did not know them well and looked no further than their bellies and their well-fed faces.
That was Tolkien describing his hobbits. But it could just as easily have been Churchill writing about Dunkirk, or the Battle of Britain, or the U-boat war in the Atlantic.
It is not difficult to see why the British found this appealing. To be sure, it portrayed them as a people with shortcomings – dangerous shortcomings of naivety and unworldliness that had almost ruined them. But attractive shortcomings all the same. Perhaps, the Shire Folk myth suggested, they should have been more aware of what was going on abroad during the 1930s. Perhaps they should have been more cognisant of the terrible possibilities of Nazism, more urgent in their response to German rearmament. But there was nothing shameful about preferring peace to war. There was nothing inexcusable about being too good-hearted to understand the totalitarian mind. They had done the right thing in the end. Besides, foolish and incompetent (and conveniently dead) leaders had encouraged them in their early follies. Attlee’s left and Churchill’s right could agree on that. This was a myth that had something to offer everyone, no matter what their politics.
It was – is – all the same, a myth. To call it a myth does not mean that there is no truth to it at all. Like all myths that endure, it has succeeded precisely because it includes much that is true. But it also includes much that is true but deceptive, and much that is only half-true, and much that is not true at all. If we want to really understand the British experience of the Second World War, we need to acknowledge the Shire Folk myth, salute it and then set it aside. Because the British people who fought and defeated Hitler from 1939 to 1945 were not nearly as innocent as hobbits. Nor as unprepared for the viciousness of total war. Nor anything like as nice.
