Concerning Hobbits, Big Folk, and One Annoying Raven
the Constitution of the Two Kingdoms of Gondor and Eriador, the rise and fall of empires, and the key difference between the Big Folk and Hobbits.
from the desk of the Master of Buckland, Took Hall
I.
The weather in Buckland has been quite windy of late. One storm followed by another. Days of rain and wind designed for comfortable chairs, seed cake, and going through old books.
I was in one of the rooms with a pile of books that passes for a library in Took Hall when I came across an old history book about Eriador. I then found an ale that was ready for consumption and settled in for the afternoon.
The kings of Gondor and Eriador were wise, though like every great line, they were not perfect. The constitution of the Two Kingdoms—a subject woefully ignored by academia (and something that an intrepid young Hobbit looking to make a name for himself would not go far wrong in setting himself to the task of producing a history of) was an interesting thing in and of itself. One fact from it certainly stands out: that no king could ever create a new law. This goes against many of our ideas of what a king, or government of any sort, is these days.
One might argue that innovation necessitates new legislation. Does it though? One of the tensions in law is the idea that the law can either be fair and just or it can be consistent. And many of the Big Folk’s juridical doctors will tell you that consistency should be preferred for this or that reason. They may have a point. They may even be right. But the privileges of being a grumpy old Hobbit is that it's my prerogative to ignore when people are annoyingly right.
The point is that a good and fair and noble King of Eriador would be able to use his judiciousness to decide outcomes that were fair first, and only be concerned with consistency later, without creating any constitutional or common law issues. And given he could not, and did not need to legislate, he need not be concerned with creating laws that contradicted other laws, or put at risk the consistency of the Eriadoran Consitution.
II.
It is more than a little tragic for us Hobbits to watch the goings-on of the Big Folk. They never seem to be able to content themselves with peace and prosperity. They must always be grasping and seeking.
A rather big and annoying raven keeps squawking at me about something called ‘Girard’ and ‘mimetic desire’. He leaves me poorly written books in a language the Big Folk call ‘French’. No matter how much I waddle after him and shake my stick he just hops off and sits on some tall tree cawing, with not a little mirth. I shall need to get my slingshot out next time he shows his beak round Took Hall. ‘Nevermore’ will that mangy bird come round here when I get my hands on a few of his feathers.
But there is something of value in these manuscripts he leaves behind, not that I recommend them to you, dear reader. I have too much affection for you to ever suggest you read them. I have too much affection for Melkor to suggest he ever read them. But if you will bear with me, then we can see what amounts to perhaps the biggest difference in the behavior of the Big Folks from Hobbits.
The concept of mimetic desire is an interesting one. It suggests that a big part of what the Big Folk desire is not what they need, nor what they want for themselves, but that it is what other people want. The classic example is two children with a toy. The first can walk past an old toy and ignore it. But the moment the second child starts playing with the ignored toy, the first wants it. This desire for it is not because the first will actually enjoy the toy, but rather they would enjoy having what the second desires and derives happiness from the control. The control of the toy implies a control of the second child. There are degrees of this as well. Me wanting what he wants, which is what he wants because I want it, seemingly ad infinitum. This is a very loose account, and I am sure there are some mistakes, but it does what I need it to, and I'll be damned if I pick up those raven pecked manuscripts again.
The account explains much about Big Folk activity. There are always plenty of men who side with dark powers not to get some particular thing they want, but because they want to control the mimetic flows, in themselves and the community. This lamentable drive means that only the most exceptional Big Folk will ever be able to find peace. They will always be coveting what others have and wanting their lives to be coveted upon. Woe betide these poor wretches.
For those of you who still wonder at the mystery of contentment that Hobbits achieve, I shall share with you here a big part of that secret: the mimetic desire is totally absent in Hobbits. There could never be a Russian Revolution in Buckland or the Shire for several reasons. Firstly, while there certainly are wealthier Hobbits, there really is not anything like a poor Hobbit. This is in large part due to the fact that poverty can be seen as a product of mimesis. I, the closest thing to a Hobbit oligarch as the Master of Took Hall, do not have a desire to control other Hobbits directly with force or indirectly through being the target of their mimetic desires. I, nor any other wealthy Hobbit, have never sought the wealth I enjoy, and certainly never sought it at the expense of another Hobbit. Perish the thought.
There are a few greedy Hobbits. One need not look any further than those blessed Sackville-Bagginses. But greed is not the same as the mimetic desire, at least not in my reading. And there are plenty who will grumble at the good fortune of others, but none who would do anything as un-Hobbit-like as a revolution.
Now some of you—I can hear the objections now—more well-informed readers will point to an unseemly event at the end of the Third Age. This was indeed a sad moment. But I will remind you it took the lies and enchantments of a fallen Wizard and some Big Folk assistant to mislead Hobbits into such a dismal situation.
That one unfortunate event aside, Hobbits have always been masters of simple peaceful living, demonstrating a harmony in relation to nature (why else would Tom Bombadil live next door to us?) and to each other. Hobbits lack mimetic desire, and with it all types of excesses… well, besides the consumption of good ale and good food, and one must ask oneself ‘Is that really an excess?’
Given this lack of memetic ambitions on the part of good gentle Hobbits, it should be no wonder that Buckland and the Shire live side by side one another with no conflict. There has never been a Hobbit war of conquest. It makes one snort with derision at the very idea. Likewise, no Hobbit ever thought of conquering Bree. Why would we? The Hobbits there seem to be doing just fine for themselves, happy to leave ambition and striving and struggling to the Big Folk; who in the Third Age were bad enough, but in this Fifth age have forced us Hobbits to remove ourselves from the scene of Big Folk drama. It is too tiring for poor simple Hobbits like us. But there is another reason why the memetic drive fails to take root. Any sensible Buckland Hobbit knows the Shire Hobbits are queer folk, and the Bree Hobbits are positively strange. We can not help but to thank Ilúvatar for making us Bucklanders. We do everything the right way, and we have the best of everything. What does the Shire have that surpasses Buckland? I know for a fact that they do not grow better potatoes, whatever Farmer Maggot says. And if he tells you otherwise, I shall go across the river and thump him on the head.
Should a Big Folk ever ask me why Buckland does not conquer the Shire I shall reply “What in heaven's name for?”
III.
Unfortunately the Big Folk are slaves to this memetic drive. They cannot help but struggle with one another in just about every domain, every generation or so. Few seem content to settle into a warm home and enjoy simple comforts. (I have heard that some Big Folk communities have people without a home, something unimaginable to even the lowliest of Hobbits, and something I must credit to the general situation this memetic drive contributes to.)
These struggles happen within communities of Big Folk, and between communities. The Kings of Eriador understood that the law was one area (among many) in which memetic struggles would play themselves out in. And not merely in the application of the law, but in its very generation. They thus put a limit on the legal wranglings and inventions that Big Folk are prone to engage in with their memetic drive.
Let the accusation not be turned around on Hobbits though. Yes we do have a legal system, and even lawyers, as testified to by that venerable firm of Messrs Grubb, Grubb and Burrow, but this only for small clerical issues such as dealing with the estate of a Hobbit who goes missing for 14 months and is presumed dead…
And so, a central part of their constitution was the inability for even the noblest and well-intentioned of kings to create a new law. Any wise king would not need it, and would know precisely how to apply the existing laws to whatever new situation they found the legal code needed to apply to...
The Big Folk continue to struggle with one another though... We Hobbits have known this for a long time, but it stretches the imagination that people of the same kind would go to war against one another. We Hobbits are by no means pushovers. We have several triumphs over Goblins to our name. But for Hobbit to war on Hobbit and Big Folk to war on Big Folk? There are no words.
And the things they go to war over increasingly make even less sense. Not having enough farmland to support one’s community would certainly make a Hobbit uncomfortable with the implications. But for one country to war on a second country because the second country will not give assurances that it will not join an alliance designed around collective protection from the first country? And that alliance of countries provoking the first country to seemingly get into a war to get members of the alliance to take the alliance more seriously? We Hobbits are too simple to properly enjoy satire, but the affairs of Big Folk would certainly have us rolling in the aisles—rolling incidentally being something rotund Hobbits are quite good at, were they not so laden with the tragic.
Now there is little that the laws of Eriador could do to prevent war with another country. But they were wise enough to preserve, in the constitution, a vitality represented in having two kingdoms.
The lesson is this: in the Big Folk, desire pushes innovation. These desires are not healthy. And innovation creates instability. Hobbits' desires are for the simple and natural, and so do not have the unhealthy connotations nor the destabilising implications. Eriador recognised this and reflected it in their constitutional arrangement. But this opposition to legal innovation was not the only part of their genius…
I shall have to leave it there for now though. And I have not even gotten to that history book I found or my main point; the instability of Empires and the vitality of Kingdoms. Which shall have to wait till my next letter. I have just jotted a note here to remind myself.
I would keep writing, but I’ve just seen that bleeding raven out my window and he's got a particularly smug look on his face. The uninitiated will tell you that ravens only have one look, but interact with enough of them and you soon learn what a smug raven looks like. Wish me luck dear reader. Now where is my stick?