[veddox]

Because this opinion has surfaced a number of times here: Yes, Tolkien did care deeply about the realism of his world. And because he spent his whole life studying pre-modern societies, the societies he creates in Middle Earth do function very realistically. I think there are two reason why many readers miss this:

(1) Much of Tolkien's world-building is implicit rather than explicit. He doesn't talk about Aragorn's tax policy because he doesn't need to; Aragorn is recognisably a feudal king and there is a standard way taxes are done a feudal system (i.e. the vassals take care of gathering them). Tolkien has a deep understanding of how such societies function, but much of this comes out indirectly in the story, through the way the characters behave and what they can and cannot do.

(2) Pre-modern societies are so deeply different from modern ones (economically, culturally, and socially) that I think many readers stumble across things they find unexpected and dismiss it as "unrealistic fantasy", without understanding that in such a context, this is exactly how one would expect the world to work. For example, the deep devotion and self-sacrificial service Sam shows to Frodo is often discussed in terms of friendship (and it is a great friendship), but one cannot fully understand it unless one also understands it as a (very positive) master-servant relationship.

If you want a better understanding of the deeper realism of LotR, I cannot recommend Bret Devereaux' blog highly enough. He is an ancient military historian and has written extensive (but entertaining!) analyses of both LotR and GoT. See here for two samples: https://acoup.blog/2020/05/22/collections-the-battle-of-helm..., https://acoup.blog/2019/05/28/new-acquisitions-not-how-it-wa...

[jameshart]

Aragorn is not a ‘feudal king’, he is a king of legend.

Tolkien was trying to write a mythology - it’s meant to be a mythological past for our actual world. It isn’t set in the medieval era of our world though, it’s meant to be timelessly ancient. Myths set in an ancient past often are told with protagonists who seem to come from a more recent time though. Consider Saint George and the Dragon - a 12th century myth about a knight in shining armor who ‘long ago’ fought a dragon. A knight - a saintly one in particular - was a contemporary character but the story was set in the ancient past of legend. Similarly the ancient Greeks told legends about the Trojan wars where characters who resembled their contemporary warriors fought alongside gods.

The anachronism is part of the form. The shire isn’t ’medieval’ or ‘feudal’, it’s timelessly rural or * bucolic*. Hobbits are in behavior far more like 19th century farmers than medieval peasantry and that’s appropriate because they are meant to represent a nostalgic persona to an early 20th century audience, even though they are participating in a story that is meant to take place in a nebulous prehistory, before the world changed.

The journey in the Lord of the Rings is almost as much a journey back through deeper and deeper legend as it is through space - the hobbits travel from a Napoleonic era Shire, through Renaissance Rivendell, back to a medieval Rohan then classical Gondor, and then into the strictly mythological Mordor.

[veddox]

I partly agree.

> Aragorn is not a ‘feudal king’, he is a king of legend.

I was not using "feudal" to denote a time period in our world's history, but rather a system of governance based on liege-vassal relationships. I agree with you that Gondor feels more classical than medieval, but as a king, Aragorn is quite clearly the liege-lord of vassals (Imrahil, Faramir, the Thain) who hold their lands by his bequest. So while Aragorn is definitely legendary in the sense that he is an idealised fictional figure, in-universe he is very much a feudal king.

> The journey in the Lord of the Rings is almost as much a journey back through deeper and deeper legend as it is through space - the hobbits travel from a Napoleonic era Shire, through Renaissance Rivendell, back to a medieval Rohan then classical Gondor, and then into the strictly mythological Mordor.

Yes, absolutely. Tolkien creates the countries of Middle Earth out of many different historical inspirations, with a heavy dose of mythology mixed in. I find it good fun to see where he got his ideas from - for example the parallels between Beowulf and Rohan (compare the great halls of Heorot and Meduseld).

But of course Tolkien never simply mixed and matched. His creativity drew on things he knew, but he didn't just recombine them, he amalgamated them into something really new. So I agree, seeing Middle Earth as "medieval Europe with a different geography" is just plain wrong, on many different levels. But still we can analyse the ingredients that Tolkien used to create his world, and use that to gain a richer understanding of it.

[richardfontana]

> The journey in the Lord of the Rings is almost as much a journey back through deeper and deeper legend as it is through space - the hobbits travel from a Napoleonic era Shire, through Renaissance Rivendell, back to a medieval Rohan then classical Gondor, and then into the strictly mythological Mordor.

Very insightful comment. I have read (and thought deeply about) the books countless times over many years but never realized this before.

[bazoom42]

If we draw parallels to history, Gondor is more like Byzantium, and Mordor and the orcs is of course the Turks. Return of the King is a fantasy where Constantinople never falls and instead the Roman empire is reunited and ressurrected.

The Classical/ancient world in Tolkien is Nuemenor which is somewhat a parallel to Troy.

[justanotherjoe]

I think the argument about the taxes is that, being a wholesome person is largely orthogonal to being a good king, like it is being good with a sword doesn't make you a good monarch. For example, letting Grima leave edoras because 'enough blood has been spilled' is really cool, but dubious and questionable.

Though I don't know much about ME and maybe in that world, the challenges present in the real world don't exist there.

[veddox]

Here's the tax policy quote in context: https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2014/04/grrm-asks-what-was-ar...

> being a wholesome person is largely orthogonal to being a good king

I disagree with Martin here. Of course, not every good person also makes a good king, and not every good (i.e. politically effective) king was a good (i.e. morally upright) person. But the thing to realise is that the political power of feudal kings was much more limited than we often assume, and was based to a large part on the continued loyalty and goodwill of their vassals. In other words, a king's power rests on the relationships he has; it is both personal and relational.

This means, of course, that a king who is perceived by his vassals as being a bad person is unlikely to keep their support and allegiance for long. He might be able to cow individual vassals by force, but the more his relationships degrade, the more precarious his position will be. (For example, King John's scandalous behaviour and personal conflicts with his barons were one of the main causes for the Baron's Revolt and the Magna Carta.)

With that in mind, it is little surprise that medieval handbooks for rulers heavily emphasise a good character, loyal relationships, and morally upstanding behaviour as key to being a successful aristocrat. Tolkien understands this, and so his depiction of kings and aristocrats focusses strongly on the relational ties between them: the fealty and oaths they have sworn, the ancient friendships and marriages that connect them, the personal admiration and sympathy they have for each other. Put differently, medieval aristocrats would readily recognise Aragorn, Theoden, Eomer and Imrahil as model princes.

(For a more detailed discussion of medieval aristocratic values, see here: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/27/a-trip-through-dhuoda-of-uzes-.... For a discussion of personal kingship - based on Crusader Kings III - see here: https://acoup.blog/2022/09/16/collections-teaching-paradox-c...)

[Svip]

> For example, letting Grima leave edoras because 'enough blood has been spilled' is really cool, but dubious and questionable.

My read has always been that Théoden was still unsure about what to do with Grima after what has been revealed. He is clearly angry at him, but it is also difficult for him to let him go, after he had has been his closest council for so long. When they meet Saruman and Grima at Isengard, Théoden even tries to plead with Grima again. And it doesn't make sense that Théoden is trying to lure Grima, because if he is trying to be cunning, he would well know that Grima would never bother, instead, it reads as Théoden still holding out hope.

So yes, it is questionable to send Grima away. And Tolkien isn't exactly subtle about it.

[smogcutter]

> being a wholesome person is largely orthogonal to being a good king

Tolkien would disagree. So strongly in fact that he wrote an entire fantasy series about it!

[s1artibartfast]

I don't think that is true for Tolkien, fantasy, or life.

If someone is a king, being a good person is synonymous with being a good king. Same with being a good loyal knight, ect.

There is no need to separate the individual and social role.

You have a moral archetype of for each social role, and judge the morality of the people in those roles against it.

[aidenn0]

Gondor has arguably more parallels to the Byzantine Empire than to a Western feudal society, so would have been a tax policy, though I suspect that more of the governments wealth would have come through collecting rent on agricultural land owned by the nobility.

If we continue the parallels to the Byzantine Empire more than the text can take us, much more important to the merchants than taxes would likely have been the government's involvement in the skilled trades (i.e. guilds) and setting of interest rates.

[atombender]

> he spent his whole life studying pre-modern societies

Tolkien was not a historian, but a philologist — professionally, he was a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics — and I think it's a stretch to say that he "studied pre-modern societies" outside the context of their languages.

The Lord of the Rings is essentially a re-imagining of pre-historic Britain, and the setting isn't so much informed by history as by mythology. LotR isn't "medieval", which is probably one of the greatest misunderstandings about the book, and one that lead to an unfortunate excess of faux-medieval sword-and-sorcery fantasy literature.

[Attrecomet]

Except it very obviously IS a medieval world. Not our Middle Ages, but a world that works very closely like how we understand Middle Ages to work. It's feudal, he understands Anglo-Saxon warfare to an amount surprising in an author of trivial literature, and he very obviously DID make a huge effort to make many details correct either in the "how we understand the past" way or to frame them in a way that is understandable for the people who read Beowulf and similar myths.

[IIsi50MHz]

Vague memories here, but I think Tolkien is said to have built his stories primarily as background for his constructed languages, because he believed that a language cannot be created in isolation without seeming hopelessly artificial and shallow.

[poulpy123]

The fact that Tolkien did care about the realism of his world doesn't mean that it is perfectly realist or perfectly coherent. I don't expect a writer to have a so perfect world building that you can analyse all parts and find it coherent and with real world counterparts

[resource_waste]

>Tolkien did care deeply about the realism of his world.

Nietzsche says that we cannot take this too seriously. An Artist's ideas will never conform to reality and the gaps torture a good artist.