Law and Institutions
in the Shire
 

The poet Marianne Moore called for poets who were "literalists of the imagination" and who would give readers "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." I have felt for many years that J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth meets this prescription in an exemplary manner. Indeed, the sense that Middle-Earth is a real place with a real history has been remarked by many of Tolkien's readers.

To a great degree, I believe, this is true because of Tolkien's lifelong immersion in reality: specifically, the reality of archaic societies, as reflected in their texts. For Tolkien's scholarly profession on the philological side of the English curriculum demanded that he spend many hours reading such texts and striving to understand them — which meant, in some part, to understand the circumstances of their making.

In this Tolkien was at one both with the classical philologists from the Grimms down to his own time, and with the founders of sociology, such as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, who wanted not only to produce a microlevel theory of one narrow slice of present-day society on which data could be collected by questionnaire surveys and analyzed through statistical software, but to understand the total historical evolution of societies in the large, and who therefore had recourse to a great variety of documents from which social detail might be gleaned. And I think their method can be applied with some interest to Tolkien's own imagined societies.

We cannot readily induce a random sample of orcs to answer question about their early childhood socialization, but we can look at the customs and events Tolkien describes and ask what social forms and processes they grow out of, and how they compare with the customs and event of societies with which we are familiar.

Indeed, the very way in which Tolkien created Middle-Earth encourages such an approach. For Tolkien began with the creation of language: of Quenya and Sindarin and of the non-Elven tongues that surrounded them, And though you can read grammars and vocabularies of these languages that appear to freeze them at a single instance in their histories, Tolkien imagined them in no such way.

His own word lists are full of etymology, and therefore of metaphors crystallized into habitual use until their figurative character was forgotten, of slips of pronunciation become habitual, of names turned into common nouns, and of all the other historical phenomena that historical philologists learn about. His storytelling provided the context within which those languages were spoken and within which their changes took place. And he regularly offered historical comparisons for the societies he imagined — above all, of course, England at various stages in his history, from Anglo-Saxon to early modern, but England envisioned through the eye of a historical scholar.
 

R.W. Franson's review of
The Ring of Words:
  Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary