noWizardme
Gondolin
Thu, 5:36pm
Views: 234
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If there's a Rousseau in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now
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"the dichotomy of human nature as expounded by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as his starting point. On the one hand, we have what Bregman views as the dominant Hobbesian perspective: humans left to their own devices are ultimately selfish. On the other, Rousseau: it was the structures of civilisation that made humans self-interested."
I did want to try and bridge from these ideas about evil in human nature back into Tolkien, but decided to leave that for a further post. Here goes.
The Shire as we see it in Book I seems a place in which hobbits live natural, happy lives, with minimum of selfish behaviour. Or obvious sources of legal compulsion to prevent anybody's worse nature getting the better of them. Round 1 to Rousseau?
But of course it is not that simple (This is Tolkien!).
The Shire hobbits are delusional to think "that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of all sensible folk...They were, in fact, sheltered, but they had ceased to remember it. " (LOTR 2e Prologue).
And not everyone in the Shire at that point is without envy or meaness. "There's some not far away that wouldn't offer a pint of beer to a friend, if they lived in a hole with golden walls," says the Gaffer, addressing Sandyman (FOTR Ch1). And the old feud over ownership of Bag End is just about to escalate, when the S-Bs discover Bilbo has left it to Frodo.
These things fall into place when our heroes return to The Shire and discover not only what has happened to it, but who among the hobbits has been seeking to profit.
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"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
(This post was edited by noWizardme on Thu, 5:37pm)
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