AN Wilson on Tolkien.

[davem]

Originally Posted by The Might

I never thought of the criticism of globalisation, of the hobbits losing their old culture in a time in which the old tales are being forgotten, the old songs no longer sung.

Tolkien wrote to Roger Lancelyn Green in 1971 about the fate of Hobbits in the ages after LotR - he talks about them becoming a fugitive & secret people, driven as men...became more & more numerous....eventually becoming a wandering & poor folk, forgetful of their arts & living a precarious life absorbed in the search for food & fearful of being seen; for cruel men would shoot them for sport as if they were animals (quoted on LotR: A Reader's Companion).

Tolkien in one of his more pessimistic moods - & possibly not to be taken as a canonical statement - but the pursuit of 'food', of things, does seem to be at the root of our disconnection from our own culture, & the forgetting of the old songs & tales, & that does seem to be what Tolkien is attacking.

Of Course, Sauron is the great advocate of 'globalisation' - he will gather all peoples under his rule & make of them a homogeneous 'society', sweeping away each culture's history, replacing their traditional songs & stories with new ones (as he attempted with his invention of the Black Speech) which will unite them into a single people - all 'global citizens'. You'll be able to get the Middle-earth equivalent of a Coke & Big Mac from Forodwaith to Far Harad, & every citizen will have their own 50inch Palantir in their living room to watch game shows & sitcoms on.

If social cohesion is measured in terms of 'motorcars, iron and steel, machine tools, nylons and chemicals' then Britain in the mid-1950s looked set for improvement. If societies, however, require shared mythologies, ideologies, folk memories, to help them cohere and to live through times of crisis, then perhaps the pessimism of Tolkien and Lewis was prophetic.