What ain't there and ought to be.

[littlemanpoet]

One of the primary drawing points of LotR is the setting: Middle Earth itself. Not least, the Shire and all the things that make it what it is.

But I recently noticed that some things are missing from the Shire that ought to be there if it's to be a viable community. It's not as if the things are actually absent from the Shire; they couldn't possibly be. The thing is, Tolkien didn't include them in any description.

One thing that ain't in the Shire and ought to be is grave yards. There are hobbit holes, lanes, gardens, a museum even, and of course lots of inns; there are mills and towers and trees and party fields and pipeweed; but no grave yards.

There are barrows in Rohan and spread across the landscape of Eriador. There is a tomb in the heart of Erebor. There is Rath Dínen in Minas Tirith. But in the Shire there is no grave yard, no tombstone; the closest we come to such a thing is the memorial to the Battle of Bywater.

What's going on then? Is Tolkien being unrealistic? Are there truly no cemeteries in the Shire? That can't be, because we have deaths listed in the family trees of Appendix C. So obviously there are graveyards in the Shire - we just never come across one.

Why not?

What else ain't there and ought to be?

-LMP

[Gurthang]

Here's a thought. The Shire was a very peaceable land. No wars, no need for town walls(exception: Buckland's Hedge) or armies or a large police force or anything like that(which could be another ain't but ought to be: army/police). The biggest problems would probably be tavern brawls, which I imagine there would be quite a few, considering how much hobbits drink.

But seriously, the Shire was very quiet and peaceful. Maybe Tolkien put the graveyards out of the picture because it would ruin the picture. Really, cemeteries are very scary places, especially in Middle Earth. I can certainly see why it would make the Shire seem less... well... Shirelike. It might make it more real, but it would ruin the quiet and perfectly peaceful feeling.

[Lalwendë]

I always find The Shire to be the most 'complete' community or society within Middle Earth - at least to my modern eyes - it has some kind of governmental structure, trade, clearly delineated districts, and many of the other aspects we might expect from a community. In contrast, other socieites seem to be lacking in essential aspects; Rohan for example does not appear to have a structure in place for trade, which may tie in with its feudal nature, but as Anglo-Saxon society had this, I would have expected to see it in Rohan.

As to why there are no graveyards in The Shire, it might simply be that Tolkien saw no need to write them into the story. Tragedies do happen in The Shire, such as The battle of Bywater, but it is essentailly viewed as an idyllic, bucolic place, and to mention such as graveyards might have affected the mood somewhat. As pure speculation on my part, maybe Hobbits followed the 'green burial' ideal, burying their dead in an eco-friendly fashion in green fields, or maybe even in their own gardens - but as I say, that's pure speculation!

[Kuruharan]

Really, cemeteries are very scary places, especially in Middle Earth.

Huh? The only cemetery in Middle earth that I remember being scary or dangerous was the Barrow Downs. The rest of them were somber and sad, but did not possess particular attributes that made them scary.

I don’t remember any mention of Hobbit funerary customs being made anywhere at all. You would think there would be some mention of it regarding the hobbits killed in the battle of Bywater.

Perhaps it has to do with the theme of the hobbits. The other burials were from more warlike races and had kind of a tone of “the great honorable dead” that would go ill with the tone for hobbits as a peaceful people.

[Mister Underhill]

Well, Sam does mention graveyards in the silly troll rhyme he recites:

'Up came Tom with his big boots on.
Said he to Troll: 'Pray, what is yon?
For it looks like the shin o' my nuncle Tim,
As should be a-lyin' in graveyard.
Caveyard! Paveyard!
This many a year has Tim been gone,
And I thought he were lyin' in graveyard.'

[Child of the 7th Age]

Good question, Littlemanpoet! You've got me thinking again when I should be doing household chores.....

My own feeling is that this is a purposeful omission. As Kuruharan and Gurthang say, it's not so much a matter of being "scary" as that a cemetary just desn't fit into the overall depiction or tone that Tolkien gave us of the Shire.

In addition to the memorial that's already been mentioned, there actually was one brief reference to the internment of the 70 ruffians and 19 hobbits killed in the Battle of Bywater. This seems to imply that burial was the general rule for Hobbits, since it's mentioned so matter-of-factly:

The dead ruffians were laden on waggons and hauled off to an old sand-pit nearby and there buried: in the Battle Pit as it was afterwards called. The fallen hobbits were laid together in a grave on the hillside, where later a great stone was set up with a garden about it.

I am trying to remember if there are any mention of Hobbit burial customs or tombs in the books outside Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit--specifically Unfinished Tales, the Peoples of Middle-earth, and the four volumes of HoMe that cover the War of the Ring. I could be wrong, but I don't believe so.

I think there are reasons for this. First, the Shire and the Hobbits originated in the children's book The Hobbit . Tolkien added to this tapestry in the beginning chapters of the Lord of the Rings but he essentially did not change the tone of things he had established earlier. Cemetaries or burial customs certainly wouldn't have fit well in a children's book, and Tolkien does not change this pattern at the start of LotR. I am reminded of Tolkien's own short description of the Shire:

...an ordered district of government and business, the business of growing food and eating it and living in comparative peace and content.

The emphasis here is heavy on "living" in the sense of day to day activities, rather than anything larger. Indeed, the Hobbits are the one folk in the book who best exemplify the simple joys of everyday life.

Other people have commented that the Shire in the early chapters of the Lord of the Rings has a different "feel" about it than other places described later on in Middle-earth. (There is a thread about this that Littlemanpoet started.) Certainly, the Shire was more fanciful, a less somber and dangerous place than others in Middle-earth. There were no Orcs, no battles or hardships in recent memory, and even the weather had taken a milder turn. The reader knows the real reason for the Shire's "protection": its relative distance from the problems further east and, even more importantly, the guardianship of the Rangers. But the Hobbits themselves did not.

There is one other point that bears mentioning. I have always seen a very sharp contrast between the realm of Numenor and that of the Shire. Tolkien may not have done this intentionally, but it certainly comes over in the reading. The people of Numenor were preoccupied with death, those of the Shire preoccupied with living. Numenor built great tombs above the ground and had elaborate burial rituals, which were similar to those in Egypt according to the Letters. The Hobbits were exactly the opposite. They had no elaborate death rituals and the holes they built in the ground were for living and not for death. Hence, there are no cemetaries in the Shire. Interesting thought indeed, when one considers that JRRT's personal experience with a "hole in the ground" was that of the trenches of World War I, places of terrible evil, death, and destruction. Perhaps, in the years after the war, some part of his mind transformed these places of death into the Hobbit holes, which were essentially symbols of life, that we all know and love.

(Interestingly, you can make a similar comparison between Hobbit "living" versus Elvish "decay"and "embalming"....)

And I can think of one other thing that is missing from the Shire, which I believe was left out very intentionally by the author. The Hobbits have no long range memory. They are a people who have forgotten where they come from. Every people that I know preserves some kind of tale that describes their origin, either in the form of history or myth, but the Hobbits simply do not remember and do not seem to be curious to know. The reader is told that they originated about 1050 in the area of the Anduin, although the Hobbits themselves preserve only tiny hints of this distant past. Nothing is known before this date, either by the Hobbits or the reader.

Obviously, like other peoples of Middle-earth, the Hobbits must have been somewhere before 1050. So why doesn't Tolkien go into this when he carefully delineates the line of migration for all three Hobbit branches starting at the Anduin? I don't think it's just negligence. And I refuse to believe that Hobbits simply sprang from the ground in the year 1050. I can think of two possible reasons for their earlier absence. Hobbits aren't part of the Silm so it's easier to say their early history is forgotten. that way there is no need to rewrite the earlier Legendarium, which Tolkien was frequently trying to do. Yet, in actuality, Tolkien really wouldn't have had to rewrite Silm since he covers himself by saying that the Elvish sources simply weren't concerned about Hobbits.

Perhaps it is more than that, and Hobbit history had to be forgotten. If Sauron had been aware of hobbits from his sojourn in Numenor or snooping about in Beleriand or in some other context, he would have been more cognizant of where they lived. He would have realized from the outset that they were a small people and easy to enslave, and would have been able to get to the Shire more easily and capture the elusive "Baggins". So perhaps Hobbit amnesia was a protective device, shielding them from prying eyes and making it possible for Gandalf to choose someone to carry the Ring whom Sauron would be less likely to suspect.

[mark12_30]

And I refuse to believe that Hobbits simply sprang from the ground in the year 1050.

Aule got bored again and created more cave-dwellers, but this time made them cute and harmless so his wife would complain less.

[littlemanpoet]

I thought that I had gotten the "pre-religious" idea from a Tolkien quote from the biography, but I haven't been able to find it again yet.

You had me worried, davem with the talk about Hobbit spirituality, but by the end of your post I was relieved at what you'd concluded about it.

I would think that the hobbits would have adopted some beliefs from the Arnor kings at Evendim, and the rest from the secular-ish Rohirrim when they lived in the Gap.

Welcome, to the Downs, Michael! I hope you enjoy being dead. As to your idea, it's in keeping with the way history works, but seems somehow out of character for hobbits as such. davem's idea of experiencing the Transcendent (though he didn't use the word) throughout the Shire, appeals to me more.

[Child of the 7th Age]

Davem, Littemanpoet

I couldn’t agree with you more that LotR has a greater sense of underlying spirituality than Silm, precisely because so much is left mysterious and unsaid. I also concur with your statement that every culture in the “real world” seeks answers to questions that we would term religious. Yet my own view of the Shire and Hobbits is somewhat different. Please excuse the length of this post. I am thinking things out.

On the question of hobbit "religion'.... Tolkien stated the following in an interview conducted in 1967:

"Hobbits," Tolkien says, "have what you might call universal morals. I should say they are examples of natural philosophy and natural religion."

This would certainly support Davem's contention that we can not assume the Hobbits were "pre-religious". Additionally, it seems clear from the text that all Hobbits had a sense of natural law: a belief that certain basic guidelines must be followed for the good of their community. However, I am not certain how far beyond this we can go. We can rule out formal religious ritual in burials or handfastings, given this footnote by Tolkien in a letter in 1954:

I do not think Hobbits practised any form of worship or prayer (unless through exceptional contact with Elves.)

An interesting statement and an even more interesting qualifier! Most Hobbits did not have any contact with Elves, so they would have fallen into the group that had no form of worship or prayer. It does, however, leave open the possibility that Hobbits like Bilbo, Frodo, or Samwise might have stood on different grounds, since they did have “exceptional contact with Elves”. This would be in accord with those instances in the text when Frodo and Sam call out to Elbereth for aid, at least from their subconscious.

To me, one of the most poignant passages in the book is when Frodo and Sam prepare to eat a meal with Faramir and his men. Frodo's reaction to what he sees says volumes, both about his own community’s lack of formal acknowledgment of the Transcendent, his personal desire for such a means of expression, and the substitution of impeccable human politeness as an alternative expression of thanks.

They were led then to seats beside Faramir: barrells covered with pelts and high enough above the benches of the Men for their convenience. Before they ate , Faramir and all his men turned and faced west in a moment of silence. Faramir signed to Frodo and Samwise that they should do likewise.

"So we always do," he said, as they sat down: 'we look towards Numenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and ever will be. Have you no such custom at meat?"

"No," said Frodo, feeling strangely rustic and untutored. "But if we are guests, we bow to our host, and after we have eaten we rise and thank him."

"That we do also," said Faramir.

How interesting that the first "Men" here is captalized, but not the second. The capital letter in the first word seems to tie in the recognition of divinity with ALL men, while the second refers to a specific group of men who were adherents of Faramir. Yet as Hobbits, Samwise and Frodo stand outside both these groups.

Davem raised these additional questions about Hobbits:

Do they have inherited 'Archetypes'? Do they 'mythologise'? If they are Children of Eru wouldn't there be some innate sense of the Divine, the numinous, which came out naturally?

I'm not sure we can go this far. For example, all peoples in Middle-earth and real life have some kind of creation story at the core of their mythologies. Throughout the Legendarium, Elves and those Men descended from Numenor have greater or lesser knowledge about the Valar and Eru. Even Dwarves are aware of Aule and the story of their creation. Yet Hobbits lack any specific knowledge about their own origins. We are explicitly told that their earliest legends go back only to about the year 1050 when they resided near the Anduin. The creation myth is missing, just as all history prior to 1050 is missing.

By the time LotR was published, Tolkien had spent almost twenty years thinking and writing about Hobbits. If he had wanted to depict Hobbit folk myths or beliefs, even indirectly, he might have done so in any number of places. For example, he could easily have had Frodo recite some verses to Aragorn that hinted obliquely, even humorously, at what Hobbits 'believed', or perhaps a “heart-to-heart” conversation with Gandalf. There is precedent for both devices in the text, but instead the author is silent.

It seems noteworthy that one of the ways underlying spirituality is hinted at in LotR is “yearning” on the part of Men and Hobbits for Elves, presumably because they are a people who actually saw the light of the Trees. Frodo, Bilbo, and Samwise all exhibit this yearning for Elves in differing ways. We particularly see this light and spiritual growth reflected in Frodo as he struggles towards Mordor. Yet, always, this is depicted in Elvish, dreamworld, or, in one instance, Numenorean terms. Frodo’s morals, his basic goodness and capacity to feel pity, were clearly a product of the Shire, but his yearning for the West and the "beyond", even his dreams, do not have any “native” roots. No wonder he had to leave the Shire at the end of the story! I have always felt there were compelling reasons to do so that went beyond healing.

Interestingly, it’s precisely this yearning for Elves that causes their hobbit neighbors to view Frodo and Bilbo aand their associates with suspicion. There are hints of this in LotR itself and a more detailed confirmation in a scene where Bilbo's gardener comments on his master's visit to the Elves in UT. The Letters confirm that Tolkien considered Frodo and Samwise and the other hobbits on the Ring quest to be “exceptionally gifted": they were different than the rest of the Hobbits. In this case, I feel he was referring to more than their intellect or physical talents. He was talking about their moral and spiritual reach.

I do see underlying currents of spirituality in LotR, and the inhabitants of the Shire exhibit a sense of natural goodness and moral law that puts most of us to shame. Yet, as much as I might like to see evidence of wider spirituality or myths or folk beliefs, I don’t sense it in the general community. Nor do I feel that Tolkien would have added such things to the text. Instead I sense a purposeful omission. Only in the case of “exceptional” hobbits, those who were willing to be labeled as “odd” by their neighbors, do we see a true yearning that encompasses the “spiritual” and myth.

[Gurthang]

Beautiful post Child.

That's very interesting about Frodo being 'exceptional' and that being a reason that he felt compelled to go West. But if that is the case, and all the Hobbits on the Ring quest were 'exceptional' in this way, then it would stand to reason that Merry and Pippin would have taken the ship also. This is where the actual bearing of the Ring comes into play. Merry and Pippin might have been "looking higher" in a sense, but because they did not actively carry the One, they could still find pleasure in the Shire and the rest of Middle Earth. Frodo and Sam could not forget or put off the effects of the Ring without going across the Sundering Seas.

It's interesting that most of the Hobbits don't seem to have any religion at all, but I think this is linked to their lack of history. They don't have any story about where they came from, or who created them, and so they don't feel that they should acknowledge a higher being. And with no story of where they started, there is no desire to wonder where they are going(meaning after they die). Those two questions(where did we come from/where are we going?) are the major building blocks at the base of religion. We think about what happens before and after life, and in this find a reason to believe that there is something more significant or higher that us.

[Petty Dwarf]

Very impressive post, Child.

Just some anthropological tidbits to toss out there: Burials and burial mounds are likely the most ancient form of funerary practice. In lesser-developed agrarian societies there are burials on the home premises or in the house itself. Honoring these nearby dead relatives probably gave rise to worship of household divinities.

Hobbits don't seem closer to ancestor worship than they do to postmortem cannibalism, but in lieu of Christian churchyards the idea of home burials seems fitting. Probably one place existed for entire extended families. If "The Stone Troll" is gleaned for insight into hobbit tradition, it gives us a "graveyard" of "bones that lie in a hole" belonging to a "father's kin".

But thinking about what else ain't there, again it's in the Shire. Again, the reasons for excluding both probably lie somewhere in-between keeping the Shire an ideal, or close to it, and necessities of a steamlined plot, or close to it.

Alcoholism Given the amount of beer hobbits consume, the frequent gathering at pubs and inns, and the later trauma of a foreign invasion (surely an occupation worse than the book describes) how likely is it that there are lots of alcoholics, if not lots of gout?

High Infant Mortality I've seen this suggested somewhere before, and it sadly seems like a topic that ought to be when considering the high rate of successful childbirths. Unless the prolific hobbits have some evolutionary advantage in childbirth, most hobbit-mothers would have lost a child, if not more.

[littlemanpoet]

Years and years of plentiful harvests have a direct effect on healthy childbirths, don't they?

And alcoholism seems worse in a land of want rather than plenty. Seems to me that hobbits, modeled after rural Westmidlanders, are probably healthy drinkers rather than over-drinkers. Although the gout would probably get them in the end, no matter the size of their feet or what have you.

By the way, if America is a land of plenty in terms of availability of food and drink and housing, it is a land of great want in terms of community and other things that make the soul healthy.