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The Medieval Cardinal Virtues in Tolkien's the Hobbit

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The Medieval Cardinal Virtues in Tolkien's the Hobbit The Medieval Cardinal Virtues in Tolkien’s The Hobbit BA Thesis Anne Sieberichs Student Number: 1271233 Online Culture: Art, Media and Society / Global Communication / Digital Media Department of Culture Studies School of Humanities and Digital Sciences Date: July 2020 Supervisor: Dr. Inge van der Ven Second Reader: Dr. Sander Bax ‘There is a lot more in him than you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea of himself.’1 1 J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (United Kingdom: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2011), 19. 2 Table of contents 1.0 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………. 4 1.1 Method………………………………………………………………………………… 5 1.2 Previous Research on Tolkien………………………………………………………….7 1.3 Tolkien’s Opus and The Hobbit………………………………………………………. 8 2.0 A Short History of Cardinal Virtues in the Middle Ages………………………………………9 3.0 Medieval Cardinal Virtues in Tolkien’s opus………………………………………………….11 3.1 Christianity and Tolkien……………………………………………………………….11 3.2 Prudence: ‘For even the very wise cannot see all ends.’2……………………………...12 3.2.1 Gandalf the prudent in The Hobbit………………………………………….15 3.3 Justice: ‘There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West.’ 3….17 3.3.1 the case of Justice through the Arkenstone in The Hobbit………………….18 3.4 Fortitude: ‘But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t.’4…………………………………………………………………………………….21 3.4.1. Fortitude: A case study of Bilbo’s Fortitude in The Hobbit………………… 24 3.5 Temperance: ‘If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.’5………………………………………………………………. 27 3.5.1 Humble Characters of The Hobbit…………………………………………. 28 4.0 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...31 5.0 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………….... 34 6.0 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………35 2 J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (United Kingdom: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2014), 61. 3J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (United Kingdom: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2011), 263. 4 J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (United Kingdom: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2014), 729. 5J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (United Kingdom: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2011), 263. 3 1.0 Introduction “There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” 6 In modern fantasy literature, the recurrent theme is often the hero going on a quest of good against evil. To battle this ethical fight, one can make an appeal on justice, fortitude, prudence and temperance as shown through Tolkien’s quote in The Hobbit. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was not only the writer of the high fantasy works such as Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit but also an academic in English literature and culture. In his fictional novels, he created a new fantasy world, called ‘Arda’ or ‘Middle- Earth’, which is inhabited by various species such as Elves, Dwarfs, Men, Orcs and Hobbits. With his successes of incorporating the fantasy genre in his works, the Oxford Companion to English Literature has called him ‘the greatest influence within the fantasy genre.’7 Tolkien’s writing created renewed popularity for the fantasy genre. At the same time, his works are also heavily influenced by medieval narratives. In them, medieval ethic is an important recurrent theme. Prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance formed the antique cardinal virtues, 8 which became Christianized during the Middle Ages. This thesis will examine to what extent the medieval, cardinal virtues influence the narrative of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The comparison between the Middle Ages and Tolkien can be explained by the influences of the medieval romances that can be found on several levels in Tolkien’s oeuvre. On the character level we have one of Tolkien’s main characters in The Hobbit, Gandalf, connecting to many sources of mythologies of many nations, such as Merlin of the Britons, Odin of the Norsemen and Hermes of the Greeks. Literary criticist David Day suggests that Gandalf is an archetypal character who takes on the form of a wandering old man in a grey cloak carrying a staff. Gandalf is highly comparable to these mythological figures as he also serves as a guide to the hero helping the hero to win against impossible odds while using supernatural powers.9 This intermingling of Tolkien’s and historical characters and narratives can be explained by the metaphor of soup-making, presented by Tolkien in his essay ‘On Fairies’. He mentions the following on the topic: 6 J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2011), 263. 7 Dinah Birch, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, seventh edition (United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2009), 360. 8 Mayke de Jong, Epitaph for an Era: Politics and Rhetoric in the Carolingian World (The Netherlands: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 106. 9 David Day, A dictionary of Sources of Tolkien (United Kingdom: Octopus Publishing Group, 2019), 156. 4 ‘Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty.’ 10 The comparison between Gandalf and Merlin of the Britons is therefore not an odd one. Cardinal virtues, originating from the Antique period, played a big part during the Middle Ages in the formation of morals and ethics and also made their entrance in medieval narratives. For instance, the Arthurian legends carry a narrative of the struggle of good against evil in an enchanted world. However, they also carry a narrative of the religious or the spiritual quest for the Holy Grail.11 As the cardinal virtues are more connected to this religious struggle of the own moral self, these are considered highly relevant in the quest of medieval ethics. Moreover, King Arthur himself struggles with these virtues, as he is presented as a noble and courageous man, though he is also prey to very human fits of anger, jealousy and lust.12 These similarities make it interesting how these cardinal, medieval ethics also come forward in this ‘twentieth-century medieval romance’ of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Literature that does not have a specific religious subject can still carry a religious message to some extent. It is therefore informative to analyze whether Tolkien’s opus has an underlying religious or moral message which we take for granted due to a Christianized culture. 1.1. Method To examine the cardinal virtues in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, this thesis will use the method of new historicism. This method is based ‘on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same historical period.’13 This method entails that the creation of a single author is not solely a fictional account, but also a social product ‘that is inextricably bound to the patchwork ‘mastertext’ of the culture that produced it.’14 The movement was primarily developed by English professor Stephen Greenblatt, who argues that one can conduct analyses of literary texts in certain historical moments.15 Neema Parvini in her book Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory gives an interesting overview what the method assumes: 1. That there is no ‘human essence’ and that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices in a particular time and place. 10 J.R.R Tolkien, “On Fairies,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (UK: HarerCollinsPublishers, 2006), 125. 11 David Carr, “Spiritual, Moral and Heroic Virtue: Aristotelian Character in the Arthurian and Grail narratives,” in Journal of Beliefs & Values, Vol. 24, No.1, 2003, 18. 12 Ibid., 19. 13 Peter Barry, Beginning theory: an introduction to literary and cultural theory, second edition (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 2002), 173. 14 Neema Parvini, Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (United Kingdom: Bloomsbury, 2012), 91. 15 Ibid., 91. 5 2. That culture has the structural properties of a text and can therefore be analysed in the same way as a text. 3. That literary texts are inextricably bound to this cultural text through a network of other texts and discourses, all of which are open to the same form of analysis. 4. That power will always seek to contain dissidence and that this drive for containment must be overcome if genuine subversion is to be achieved. 5. That it is possible to produce ‘counter-histories’, that is, histories that explore what is only glimpsed or ignored in dominant historical accounts, through an engagement with the ‘real’ lived experiences of people, as documented by anecdotes.16 As we compare The Hobbit from 1937 with medieval ethics, the historical period will not be equal for the literary and non-literary texts. The use of this method is still justified by the fact that Tolkien’s Middle Earth oeuvre contains many resemblances to the medieval romances. This will be the connecting factor in conducting the new historicist method. In this sense, we will get insights in to what extent Tolkien’s The Hobbit could be considered medieval influenced due to his education, but also whether Christian, medieval influences are implemented within the work. Tolkien also explained in his essay ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ how this fourteenth-century chivalric romance fits the ‘good fairy story’17, which connects it to Tolkien’s opus: ‘There is indeed no better medium for moral teaching than the good fairy story […]. As the author of Sir Gawain, it would seem, perceived; or felt instinctively, rather than consciously: for being a man of the fourteenth century, a serious, didactic, encyclopaedic, not to say pedantic century, he inherited ‘faerie’, rather than turned deliberately to it.’18 Additionally, Tolkien has agreed on the fact that these stories – and other stories – pick and mix aspects of the past, as we have described the ‘soup making’ metaphor of Tolkien.
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