Perhaps the most important overall picture we get of Hobbits and their lifestyle is one of simplicity. ey are simple people with simple tastes, and they are fond of the simple comforts of modest living. As the nar-rator of e Hobbit tells us in the book’s second sentence, Bilbo’s home
“was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” At certain points in the novel, the narrator seems critical of the Hobbits’ extreme love of com-fort, suggesting that at times it can manifest itself as something other than virtue. However, there is much that is good about the Hobbits’
values. Even the particular types of comforts they prefer are associated not with modern gadgets and machinery but rather with living simply.
To be sure, they are not averse to the ownership of possessions, but the Hobbits derive pleasure principally from good food, friendship, and an unhurried lifestyle that is made more leisurely not through the use of modern technology by the absence of it.
is idea runs counter to the modern orthodoxy of “bigger, better, more, faster” that lies at the heart of the relentless pursuit of technical and mechanical innovation in advanced societies. It has been pointed out that modern life can be characterized by, among other things, its fre-netic pace. Colin Gunton, for example, calls “the paradox of modernity”
the fact that technological advances have brought less, not more, leisure time: “ e modern is less at home in the actual time and space of daily living than peoples less touched by [technological] changes. . . . e par-adox is that there is to be found more genuine leisure in ‘undeveloped’
societies than in those dedicated to the creation of leisure.”11 Gunton cites E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 Small Is Beautiful, a classic of its time that had widespread social impact and, among other things, helped inspire the “Green” movement of environmental activism. Schumacher wrote,
“ e pressure and strain of living is very much less in, say, Burma, than it is in the United States, in spite of the fact that the amount of labour-saving machinery used in the former country is only a minute fraction of the amount used in the latter.”12
Schumacher was a cultural forerunner in popularizing an alterna-tive orthodoxy of simplicity that could seemingly o er people greater satisfaction in their lives.13 e title of Schumacher’s book became a catchphrase for an enduring theme in popular culture, championed recently in Joseph Pearce’s Small Is Still Beautiful.14 It is interesting—
though perhaps not surprising—that Pearce also has written about J. R. R.
Tolkien and sees environmental implications in Tolkien’s portrayal of Hobbits. In an essay entitled “Tolkien as Hobbit,” Pearce discusses Tolkien’s anti-industrialism in connection with Schumacher’s, seeing both writers as participants in “a long tradition of opposition to the evils of the industrial age.”15
Similarly, in his book Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster writes about the “discipline of simplicity,” which in his opinion requires both an internal spirit and an external application. Perhaps the most impor-tant application of simplicity is in the lifestyle we live and its e ect on both world ecology and those who su er most from degradation of the environment. Discussing the lack of simplicity in modern society and in most modern lifestyles, he writes: “We must clearly understand that the lust for a uence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psy-chotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. . . . Covetousness we call ambition. Hoarding we call prudence. Greed we call industry.”16
By contrast, simplicity is one of the defining features of the Shire.
Rather than craving things they do not need, Hobbits enjoy what they have. ey do not hoard but give freely, an attitude reflected in the habit of giving (rather than receiving) gi s on one’s birthday. us they prac-tice the third of Foster’s ten principles of simplicity: “Develop a habit of giving things away.” ey also do well on the fourth: “Refuse to be propagandized by the custodians of modern gadgetry.”17 Unlike many of us, Hobbits are not collectors of gadgets.18 Foster’s sixth principle is
“develop a deeper appreciation for the creation.” He says, “Get close to the earth. Walk whenever you can. Listen to the birds . . . enjoy the tex-ture of grass and leaves.”19 Foster, Schumacher, and other advocates of simpler living might have derived this principle directly from studying Tolkien’s Hobbits. An overarching principle, and one that Foster sug-gests separates the positive virtue of simplicity from the negative one of asceticism, is that “the creation is good and to be enjoyed.”20
e values of the Hobbits are seen most sharply when they come into contrast with those of others around them. Hoarding tendencies are most clearly exhibited by dragons, particularly the dragon Smaug, who is the archvillain of e Hobbit. But Tolkien also shows this hoard-ing tendency and its sad result in Dwarves, who appear frequently in connection with dragons. is connection seems to have been a
com-monplace of early medieval culture. A seminal source for Tolkien—
both professionally and creatively—can be found in the Old Norse Völsunga Saga, where the dwarf Andvari has a golden treasure and a magic ring that are seized by Fáfnir, a man transformed into a dragon by the curse of greed, the curse of the hoard, or both.21 One of the most moving scenes in e Hobbit is the death of the Dwarf king orin, whose dying words to Bilbo are, “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world” (H, 348). As orin acknowledges only moments earlier, the specter of impending death—of going to “the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers”—forces a clearer vision and a reevaluation of what is really important. orin repents of his earlier unkind words to Bilbo, contrasting the traditional values of the Hobbits, which are vindicated throughout the story, with those of the Dwarves, which have brought such trouble.
Wendell Berry might take the principle of orin’s dying words a step further, seeing hoarding, a problem addressed by Foster as well, as the central problem to be corrected. Among other things, the hoarder cannot fully appreciate what he or she is hoarding. Tolkien certainly makes this point with respect to the dragon Smaug, who appreciates the monetary value of objects but not the objects themselves—their beauty or inherent worth. More significantly, perhaps, land itself can-not be appreciated or cared for properly when it is made the object of possessive accumulation: “It is well understood that ownership is an incentive to care. But there is a limit to how much land can be owned before an owner is unable to take proper care of it. e need for atten-tion increases with the intensity of use. But the quality of attenatten-tion decreases as acreage increases.”22 is idea is stated in many of Berry’s essays as a contrast between small family farms and the agricultural empires of agribusiness. For the former, success is defined in terms of producing good crops, in an environmentally sustainable manner, for the consumption of the farmer and his family, the surplus being made available for the needs of neighbors. For people involved in ness, success is defined in terms of the money economy; the agribusi-nessman must accumulate larger tracts of land, more equipment, and larger storage capacity to survive in the agricultural market, creating an endless cycle of acquisition and dependency. Hoarding fits the goals of agribusiness; by means of hoarding, there are “corporations that have bought cheap and sold high the products that, as a result of this agenda,
have been increasingly expensive for farmers to produce.”23 us hoard-ing is sometimes a good way to make money, but it is always a bad way to live life.
An even greater contrast can be seen between Hobbits and Orcs.
When we first meet Orcs—called Goblins in e Hobbit—we learn a good deal about their values, and they are not entirely without what one might call virtues. Although “they make no beautiful things,” they at least “make many clever ones.” Cleverness or ingenuity might be seen as having the positive value of problem solving. Mechanical solutions to the problems of the physical world o en bring problems of their own, however, and the Goblins are said to have invented “some of the machines that have since troubled the world,” ingenious devices that make use of “wheels and engines and explosions.” Like us, Orcs are interested in saving labor, but they are described as “not working with their own hands more than they could help,” suggesting not a pursuit of e ciency to liberate them from tedium for the sake of higher inter-ests but rather lethargy or slothfulness. eir slothfulness has a par-ticularly sinister side, too: whatever labor cannot be done by machines, the Orcs avoid by using slaves, who “have to work till they die for want of air and light.” Tolkien’s narrator passes judgment on the Orcs’ badly applied value system, calling them “wicked and bad-hearted” (H, 108–9).
e implications for modern life in the real world should not be lost.
People in technologically advanced, consumer-oriented societies o en find themselves enslaved to the very machines meant to free them from toil—machines that contribute in no small way to pollution of the soil, water, and air and thus to the general endangerment of life and health.
By contrast, Hobbits not only love beautiful things but also love to work with their hands. ey particularly like good earth and well-farmed countryside. ough they are “skilful with tools,” they dislike and do not understand any machines “more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a handloom” (Pro). We will postpone lengthier remarks on the agrarian nature of Hobbit society until chapter 3, but for now we want to connect this with several earlier points. e first is that the Hobbits’ appreciation for the simple pleasures of good food, sing-ing, hot baths, and the like is related to the value they place on nature:
the grass, the brown earth beneath their feet, the river in the meadow, the blue sky overhead. e second is that they turn away from the sort of power over others—enslavement and war making—that technology
a ords: the kind of technology devised by Saruman and employed by Orcs. Instead, Hobbits prefer the work of their own hands and closer connections to the things of the earth they love.
Here it must be noted with some concern that neither of the Bagginses—neither Bilbo nor Frodo, the primary heroes of e Hobbit and e Lord of the Rings—do any such work themselves. As far as the reader is informed, Bilbo and Frodo never actually get their own hands dirty in their gardens; instead, they pay the Gamgees to do it for them.
However, there are four important observations to make with respect to this fact. e first is that although the Bagginses are not farmers or even gardeners, their personal sympathies seem wholly consistent with those of their surrounding culture. Early in e Lord of the Rings, the fellow hobbits with whom the Bagginses are most closely and even a ectionately related—Sam Gamgee, Hamfast “the Ga er” Gamgee, Farmer Cotton, and Farmer Maggot, for example—do perform such work. Pippin is also from a farming family. Second, and more impor-tant, the narrator (at least in e Hobbit) seems critical of the Bagginses precisely because they are becoming too much like the snobby upper class: people who say the opposite of what they mean and make others do their work for them. As Tom Shippey points out, Gandalf is trying to rescue Bilbo from being a member of the bourgeoisie—a simple, selfish materialist like his relatives the Sackville-Bagginses, whom the narrator is clearly critical of. Bilbo is not there yet, but he is “heading that way.”24
ird, upon the return of the four heroes in e Lord of the Rings, the reconstruction of the Shire is clearly supported by Frodo, even though Sam and many others do the actual work of rebuilding, requiring sim-ple manual labor. And finally, it is not Frodo but Sam, the gardener and forester, who emerges as the real “hero” of the reconstruction—and the only Hobbit ever elected mayor for four terms in the Shire—while Frodo, for various reasons, is unable to cope.