Law and Institutions
in the Shire
 

A second source can be found in Tolkien's philological studies. One of the numerous languages he studied in his life was ancient Icelandic. Now, ancient Iceland was a thoroughly rural society, scattered about the coastal margins of an inhospitable island. At the same time, it was a highly literate and well-educated one, which in fact left us one of the most impressive bodies of literature from before the invention of printing, and doubly so considering its small population. Its political institutions were a mix of aristocratic chieftainship, republicanism and anarchy. (A very useful brief account of these institutions is given by Friedman [1989] and a more extensive one by Miller [1990].)

For example, the entire island had only one paid official, the Lawspeaker, whose principal duty was to recite the entire legal code over the course of three annual Things or meetings for the settling of disputes — any legal rule that the Lawspeaker failed to remember and that no one else protested against having dropped being removed from the legal code thereafter.

Even the history of Iceland bears at least a superficial resemblance to that of the Shire, in that it was settled by a series of migrations from the East, from Norway, into unoccupied land. The original settlement in each case was by numerous small groups each led by a chieftain. I am left wondering to what degree Iceland furnished a model for Tolkien's imagining of the Shire. At the very least it offers a case for the plausibility of such a rural aristocratic republic as a social order.

Law and government were not, to be sure, Tolkien's primary interest. But he spent most of his adult life in the intellectual effort to comprehend manuscripts from an earlier time in history, for many of which questions of law were vitally important — for example, the Icelandic sagas where one of the main interests of ancient Nordic warriors seems to have been suing each other.

It would be somewhat surprising if none of this had crept into his portrayals of societies of an imagined past, especially when his own remarks show concern that what is attributed to such societies be appropriate to their actual historical circumstances. In fact, I believe that much did, and I hope that this little case study of the Shire has helped to convince you of this and to persuade you to share my appreciation of Tolkien's realism even in the creation of fantasy. This realism, I think, is part of what makes Tolkien one of our greatest writers of fantasy: he is not just making things up in sheer fantasy, he is creating imagined worlds with an inner consistency approximating that of the real world which he had studied so carefully.