Q: Are Hobbits Anarchists?
ANSWER: This question is making the rounds on social media, although it may be an old question. Some people believe that Hobbits (specifically the Hobbits of the Shire) don’t have a system of authority – that they don’t live with the rule of law.
Technically, the word anarchy was coined in the 1500s and originally meant “(an) absence of government”. The literal meaning of the word’s root (Greek anarkhia) is “without a leader” or “lacking a leader”.
The Hobbits of the Shire are not a leaderless society. In fact, they have many leaders.
Non-violent anarchists of the 1800s were proponents of the concept of order without power. Socialist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon thought that order could be achieved without a central authority, through man’s moral compass. Society, he reasoned, could “seek justice in anarchy. Anarchy – the absence of a sovereign – such is the form of government to which we are every day approximating.”
Historical anarchism evolved into multiple movements, some of them quite violent. Some were early experiments in what we would today call communal living. All of them sought to bring about an evolution of society away from monarchs and strong central governments. But attempts to launch formal, world-wide movements in anarchy failed. The very idea of organizing anarchy for the entire world through a congress is inongruous with the concept of “power without authority”.
J.R.R. Tolkien Identified with Anarchy on A Personal Level
In Letter No. 52, which he wrote to his son Christopher in November 1943, JRRT wrote:
My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the act and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to ‘King George’s council, Winston and his gang’, it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo efiscopari1 as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes’ hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don’t seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin’s bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.
That’s a lot to digest and one must keep in mind that Tolkien wrote this at the height of the Second World War, when in some places people were “dynamiting factories and power-stations” to stop fascist armies from taking over the world. Of course, as many of Tolkien’s fans like to point out, he wasn’t a great fan of industrialization.
All that aside, J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t invent any Elvish (or other) words for anarchy or anything like it in Middle-earth. You could construct some Elvish words that have a similar meaning (Sindarin u-aran and u-hir come to mind), but there is no anarchist-like movement in Middle-earth. At least, none that is overtly described in the stories.
In Letter No. 154, which he wrote in April 1954, Tolkien had this to say about Entwives:
I think that in fact the Entwives had disappeared for good, being destroyed with their gardens in the War of the Last Alliance (Second Age 3429-3441) when Sauron pursued a scorched earth policy and burned their land against the advance of the Allies down the Anduin (vol. II p. 79 refers to it). They survived only in the ‘agriculture’ transmitted to Men (and Hobbits). Some, of course, may have fled east, or even have become enslaved: tyrants even in such tales must have an economic and agricultural background to their soldiers and metal-workers. If any survived so, they would indeed be far estranged from the Ents, and any rapprochement would be difficult – unless experience of industrialized and militarized agriculture had made them a little more anarchic. I hope so. I don’t know.
So he seems to imply that the Ents were “anarchic”. That leads to some interesting questions about Treebeard’s place among the Ents, but in the story he doesn’t do much more than call on a couple dozen Ents to come chat with him in a moot about what is going on with Isengard.
Shire Hobbits Were Anything but Anarchic
The Shire was founded by Marcho and Blanco after they received permission from the King of Arthedain to colonize former royal lands. The authority of the king was completely and totally recognized.
After the fall of Arthedain the Shire-folk chose a leader:
The Shire-folk survived, though war swept over them and most of them fled into hiding. To the help of the king they sent some archers who never returned; and others went also to the battle in which Angmar was overthrown (of which more is said in the annals of the South). Afterwards in the peace that followed the Shire-folk ruled themselves and prospered. They chose a Thain to take the place of the King, and were content; though for a long time many still looked for the return of the King. But at last that hope was forgotten, and remained only in the saying _When the King comes back_, used of some good that could not be achieved, or of some evil that could not be amended. The first Shire-thain was one Bucca of the Marish, from whom the Oldbucks claimed descent. He became Thain in 379 of our reckoning (1979).
I had much to say about Thains and leaders among the Hobbits in my classic essay Of Thegns and Kings and Rangers and Things. I won’t repeat it all here, but the Thainship was hereditary and Tolkien explained in the LoTR Prologue that it was the Thain who “was the master of the Shire-moot, and captain of the Shire-muster and the Hobbitry-in-arms”.
When Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin returned to the Shire, Farmer Cotton told them how Pippin’s father (then rightful Thain of the Shire) had defied Saruman’s ruffians (and their puppet, Lotho Sackville-Baggins). Pippin rode off to get “an army of Tooks”. So the rebellion (or resistance) was technically already in progress and led by the Thain.
The wealthier Shire families had recognized heads, essentially clan-chieftains, a system Tolkien described in Letter No. 214 (written in 1958/1959). The Master of Buckland was in some ways equivalent to the Thain of the Shire – that is, he ruled a Hobbit-land in place of the King. The Buckland did not become a part of the Shire until Aragorn (Elessar) made it so. Frodo was never head of the Baggins family (clan), but he acted in that capacity when he said it was “time the family dealt with” his cousin Lotho. The Baggins headship, according to the letter, probably passed to Ponto Baggins II.
The Mayor of Michel Delving (aka “the Mayor of the Shire”) was another example of how Shire-Hobbits established and recognized authority via a conferred leader. The Mayor was the administrative leader of the Shire, overseeing both the Shire-post and the Shirriffs (and the Bounders).
All in all, I think people who believe the Hobbits were anarchists either don’t understand what the word means or are unaware of all the positions of authority recognized by the Shire-folk. And those authorities for all intents and purposes derive from the authority of the King of Arnor/Arthedain.
It could be that someone started a joke about Hobbits being anarchists and it got carried away. I believe the Tickld meme about Gandalf’s alleged scheme to use the Eagles was, in fact, a joke that too many people took seriously.
In any event, Tolkien never imagined nor implied that the Hobbits (of the Shire, the Buckland, or the West-march) were anarchists. A case might be made for some kind of philosophical anarchy among the Bree-folk, but I don’t believe the lack of description of a form of government in the Bree-land automatically means there was no form of government there. Tolkien never found a reason to answer questions about Bree’s government, so readers are free to imagine how the Bree-folk might have governed themselves. I think, however, the fact that four villages and their surrounding farms all considered themselves to be part of the Bree-land implies there was some formal structure to their society.
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I think minarchy would more accurately describe the Shire than anarchy.
Tolkien does say in the Prologue that the Shire had almost no formal government at the time of the story, with the extended families mostly managing their own affairs but cooperating as needed with the other families. It’s pretty close to a kibbutz system. They follow The Rules, but you’d be hard out to it to find any of the Rules in writing. When Frodo and his companions return to the Shire Sam is incensed by “a lot of rules and orc-talk,” rather implying that he sees excessive rules as a by product of Sauron’s tyranny.
Thane as it usually spelt was a local noble who ruled under the authority of the king in the Saxon era in England and later in Eastern Scotland. A rather well known example was Macbeth Thane of Cawdor