The Hobbit and the Hermeneutics of the Barnyard

Abstract

The Hobbit and the Hermeneutics of the Barnyard Nathan Kowalsky (bio) The Mirkwood Elves in The Hobbit subvert the broadly agrarian landscape hermeneutics which the rest of Tolkien's classic book (along with the fantasy genre more generally) reinforces. These Elves represent a healing of the breach between Civilization and the Wild more effectively than Tolkien was able to achieve with the competing Baggins and Took instincts in Bilbo. As such, the Mirkwood Elves present an opportunity for reconciliation between indigenous peoples and Westerners who might otherwise perpetuate the narrative of heroic conquest in their own fairy stories. To make this case, I must begin with an excursus into philosophical anthropology, specifically the landscape hermeneutics of agrarian material culture. The first part of this paper, therefore, does not concern The Hobbit, but rather the theoretical framework I am applying to it: the hermeneutics of the barnyard. While scholarly notice of this hermeneutics began in the late 1950s and continues to be fruitfully advanced in modern scholarship (for example, in James C. Scott's 2017 work on early political states), it is usually underappreciated or overlooked. Readers may be unfamiliar with the hermeneutics of the barnyard—even though it structures vast stretches of the Western tradition—and so a fairly detailed sketch of its main outlines is needed to provide a basis of application to Tolkien's Hobbit. The payoff for this approach comes in sections two and three. In section two, I show how The Hobbit embodies many salient aspects of the barnyard hermeneutic, from the bucolic scenes of domestic life in Bag End to the subterranean hells of Goblin-town under the Misty Mountains. In section three, I argue that the Elves of Mirkwood (and to a lesser extent, the Elves of Rivendell) rupture the barnyard hermeneutic by being "Good People." Even though they dwell in the Wilderland's forest of darkness and evil, the Elves expose a crack in the agrarian dualisms that characterize the rest of the novel. I then conclude by gesturing towards ways in which this Elvish fracturing can contribute "to a truer and more perilous Faërie" (Hillman 37) than perhaps even Tolkien envisioned. [End Page 47] I. The Hermeneutics of the Barnyard As early as 1958, the radical environmental theorist Paul Shepard proposed the Neolithic Revolution as the decisive event in humanity's ecological and intellectual history. Agriculture profoundly affected—and continues to affect—both our species' relationship to the land and the symbolic renderings of that relationship. Agriculture (including horticulture, tillage, and herding)1 is a manipulative technique applied to animals, plants, or landscapes which aims at the production of greater quantities of food than foraging for pre-existing food sources can achieve. While it permitted exponential population growth and (with the exception of nomadic pastoralism) required human sedentism, the agricultural revolution lowered human nutritional intake and life expectancy, caused soil depletion and salinization, accelerated erosion, and removed native flora and fauna in favor of domesticated cultivars and livestock. Moreover, the agrarian task-scape fostered the belief that "the subjugation of nature, and the domination and manipulation of living creatures" was normal, natural, and essential to the human condition (Serpell 175). Moreover, because the land and its denizens do not naturally conform to being managed, cultures founded on agriculture tend to frame the world in terms of oppositions that valorize whatever lies within a farmer's control and denigrate that which lies outside it. Shepard identifies this dualistic value schema as an "ethic of the barnyard" (60–61), whereby animals are expected to behave according to norms dictated by life in an enclosure. For example, aggression is counter-productive when living inside a pen with other animals; domesticated (literally "house-trained") livestock are therefore artificially selected for docility. Predators, however, wreak havoc in pens of docile animals, stealing the lives of the stock from the farmer. This violence makes their predatory instincts appear bloodthirsty, vicious (i.e., "filled with vice"), and opposed to the perceived peace, harmony, and order of the fenced settlement. Ethically, therefore, animals are expected to behave in ways conducive to life on the farm (from the French, ferme, "[en]closed"); virtuous behavior follows the dictates...