Intro
If your only exposure to Tolkien’s mythic world of Orcs and Elves is Peter Jackson’s movies or Lego sets, you probably don’t know that Tolkien didn’t just sit down to write some run-of-the-mill fantasy novel. Tolkien was a hard-core philologist (like a linguist, but more literary) who had invented a whole bunch of languages and a world of peoples to speak them.
Underlying the lush New Zealand setting and the tale of hobbits and kings, then, is a meditation on the relationship between language and reality. While we wouldn’t quite call Tolkien a hermeneutic philosopher, we could say that he was doing hermeneutics by way of myth-making. Each of his languages became, in the world he created, traditions in the Gadamerian sense: distinct places that make interpretation possible and in which interpretation happens.
And if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that the various peoples of Middle-Earth don’t just speak different languages—they use language differently. And how each people uses language tells us a lot about how they see and understand the world around them.
Take a scene from early in the novel, when Frodo and his hobbit friends have just set out on their journey and, while fleeing the dreadful Black Riders, chance to run into some friendly elves. The way they talk about having to face danger so closed to their home in the Shire is like candy for a hermeneutic critic with a sweet tooth.
Quote
“I cannot imagine what information could be more terrifying than your hints and warnings,” exclaimed Frodo. “I knew that danger lay ahead, of course; but I did not expect to meet it in our own Shire. Can’t a hobbit walk from the Water to the River in peace?”
“But is not your own Shire,” said Gildor. “Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.”
Analysis
Gildor—the head elf of this particular crew—means this image of fencing physically, of course, but also hermeneutically. The hobbits of the Shire think of the place as theirs because they’ve been there longer than any one of them can remember. For them, the Shire means the place where hobbits live in peace and quietude and occasional giant feasts with wizards and fireworks.
But the rise of the novel’s chief villain has seen an end to those features. Gildor reminds Frodo that the lives of the hobbits are only part of the story of the Shire, not its whole. Sure, the little patch of land means something to them, and maybe they even mean something to it, but neither completes the other, at least not in a Jerry Maguire kind of way.
Frodo’s mistake is treating part of what the Shire means as if it were the whole of its meaning. Gildor takes him on a ride around the hermeneutic circle, and because Frodo listens, he grows in wisdom. Sure, he has to fight a couple of Orc battles and lose a lot of his besties along the way, but if that’s not key to the road to wisdom, hermeneutics ain’t going to give you much more.