A Phuulish Fellow

I thought I’d take a look at that infamously enduring social institution – class structure. But not real-world class structure – Tolkienian class structure, of the variety that George R.R. Martin thinks is somehow lacking in Middle-earth. Yes, today we are delving into the social code that Tolkien uses to describe The Shire, that strange little modern imprint on a world that is otherwise so resolutely pre-modern.

That Tolkien’s Shire has a class system is obvious: everyone can spot the difference between Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee – the pair are close friends, but one is in a socially superior position. Ergo, Sam famously considers Frodo his “master” and tugs the proverbial forelock. But in considering The Shire as a whole, the class dynamics are more complex, to the point where Tolkien’s subtle social coding sometimes goes over the reader’s head. This goes double for readers who apply their own, localised, notions of class structure – English class structure (on which The Shire is based) is not purely a matter of wealth and income. Wealth and income play a role, but they are just components of a wider whole.

A true upper-class Englishman is part of a landowning family, and the family has a title to go with it. The old family home may be a bit shabby these days – maybe parts of it are starting to crumble, maybe Mad Uncle Cecil got a bit too heavily into horses, alcohol, and debt – but land, title, and genealogy carry the day. Another key factor is that the true upper class never care what others think of them. They can be eccentric as they like, and it won’t affect their social standing. Society is also very forgiving of their foibles, to the extent that a social faux pas (like, say, being a Roman Catholic in the nineteenth century) is something they can generally get away with. It might be hushed up, of course, not mentioned in polite company, but it will never destroy them, in a way it might destroy someone of the middle-class.

If you read the previous paragraph, and suddenly thought “hey, that sounds like the Tooks!”, you have been paying attention. The Tooks are Shire aristocracy in the most classical sense (Pippin even makes a passable stab at being the Bertie Wooster of Middle-earth). They have the title (the Thainship), the landed estates (Tookland), the ancestral family home (Great Smials), and a reputation for unbridled eccentricity, which everyone in The Shire has come to put up with… because they are Tooks. It’s what they are, while their enormous wealth is more-or-less treated as a social bonus. The Brandybucks are another good example. They too have title (Master of Buckland), lands (Buckland), ancestral family home (Brandy Hall), and a reputation for being a bit different, though in their case the reputation is tied up with a whiff of “being a bit foreign” – they’re from the other side of the river, don’t you know. Oh yes, and none of them work.

This brings us to one of the great misconceptions about The Shire’s class system – it even appears in the McGarry and Ravipinto article linked above. The Bagginses are not true upper class. Bilbo and Frodo are both upper-middle-class, on account of their Took and Brandybuck mothers (Bungo and Drogo Baggins definitely married up), and Bilbo’s wealth certainly does not hurt, but here the coding is very different. There is no title associated with being a Baggins – Bilbo is a mere “Bilbo Baggins, Esq,” in Thorin’s contract, a gentleman but not an aristocrat. Bag End is a comfortable property, but it lacks the scale or history of the Took or Brandybuck homes, and while it might possibly come with rental properties attached (Bagshot Row?), we are not talking landed estates. It is altogether more modest.

The clincher, however, is Tolkien’s use of “respectability” as a descriptor. Recall that the true upper-class never care what others think – they are above social embarrassment. Not so the middle-class, who must work night and day to preserve a particular social image, and so we find the Bagginses making boring predictability their defining character-trait. They are stalwartly unremarkable and normal, and Bilbo’s eccentricities hurt his reputation far more than one would normally expect (luckily for Bilbo, he doesn’t really care – our Mr Baggins is a class rebel). For another literary example of this respectability signifier, consider the Dursleys from Harry Potter. Their distaste for wizarding nonsense is not simply a comment on Vernon’s bigoted personality (though he is bigoted), but also a comment on the Dursleys’ social standing. Decent, middle-class people don’t go in for robes and wands!

Yet another distinction between upper and middle-class is ambition. A true aristocrat never obsesses about rising through the ranks, since one cannot rise when one is already at the top (Rowling accordingly errs by categorising Slytherins as both aristocratic and ambitious). A middle-class person, on the other hand, may desire social mobility, generally through substituting obscene amounts of money for titles and tradition.

(Working class social mobility is a bit distinct, and is something we shall discuss later).

Tolkien plays middle-class social climbing in two ways. The first is for laughs. Bungo Baggins (Bilbo’s father) builds Bag End for his Took wife, but uses her money to pay for it. Drogo Baggins (Frodo’s father) hangs around his Brandybuck in-laws for the free food at dinner parties. Neither Bungo nor Drogo are presented as bad men, however: it is a gentle humour, making light of men marrying up, then taking advantage of the situation (Tolkienian men tend to marry up).

The second way is a darker case study: the Sackville-Bagginses. The Sackville-Bagginses are middle-class, of course (in the drafts, Otho is even explicitly a lawyer), but are incredibly pretentious – hence the hyphenated, Frenchified surname. Tolkien provides us with some interesting insight in a letter:

Customs differed in cases where the ‘head’ [of a family] died leaving no son. In the Took-family, since the headship was also connected with the title and (originally military) office of Thain, descent was strictly through the male line. In other great families the headship might pass through a daughter of the deceased to his eldest grandson (irrespective of the daughter’s age). This latter custom was usual in families of more recent origin, without ancient records or ancestral mansions. In such cases the heir (if he accepted the courtesy title) took the name of his mother’s family — though he often retained that of his father’s family (placed second). This was the case with Otho Sackville-Baggins. For the nominal headship of the Sackvilles had come to him through his mother Camellia. It was his rather absurd ambition to achieve the rare distinction of being ‘head’ of two families (he would probably then have called himself Baggins-Sackville-Baggins): a situation which will explain his exasperation with the adventures and disappearance of Bilbo, quite apart from any loss of property involved in the adoption of Frodo. 

Note the distinction between the ancient Tooks (old money), and the more recent Sackville-Bagginses (new money). Note also Otho’s ridiculous ambition, which speaks entirely to his frustrated middle-class status. He and Lobelia could quite easily fit into Keeping Up Appearances.

The nouveau riche aspect of the Sackville-Bagginses comes to full flower in Lotho. Inheriting a property base from his father, Lotho is a man with drive, who intends to supplant the traditional order with a new way of doing things. Money from commerce gets translated into power, via hired thugs, which enables a temporary usurpation of normality. Which means that the traditional order – the actual upper class of The Shire – is not happy:

You see, your dad, Mr. Peregrin, he’s never had no truck with this Lotho, not from the beginning: said that if anyone was going to play the chief at this time of day, it would be the right Thain of the Shire and no upstart.

In the end, the Tooks reassert themselves in what amounts to an inter-class collaborative revolution. Calling it an aristocratic restoration is to over-egg the pudding, however. It’s really a battle between hobbits of every social class and external usurpers. Lotho himself is long gone, destroyed by his own ambition.

So much for the middle-classes, who in contrast to the upper-class, do actually work from time to time (c.f. Grubb, Grubb, and Burrowes, the auctioneers from The Hobbit). What of the working class? The agricultural labourers, since The Shire has no urban society in any real sense?

Well, it rather goes without saying that Tolkien was rather fond of them. It’s the social class Samwise Gamgee comes from, after all, and the Cotton family play a key role in the Scouring. Salt-of-the-earth types, certainly, with hearts firmly in the right place, some adorable foibles, and perhaps a forgivable whiff of self-satisfaction when they sit down to a well-earned beer at the Ivy Bush.

That well-earned self-satisfaction is a rather more than a joke, however. One key aspect of working class culture is regarding “good honest toil” as the bedrock of personal identity – sticking with one’s mates, getting the (physical) job done, and not shirking. It is a very collectivist mindset, with a flipside being a distaste for anyone having ideas beyond one’s station. Heaven help you if you come across as thinking you are better than someone else (and lest anyone think I am slandering here, I have working class family. I have seen this in action).

This sounds counter-intuitive – the middle-class dream of upward social mobility (the Sackville-Bagginses want to become upper class), so why wouldn’t the working class want to become middle-class? Simple: aspiring to move into a higher class is so associated with being middle-class that rejecting the premise is (or at least was) itself part of working class identity – there’s no room for bourgeois decadence or affectation in a community where, as mentioned, one’s worth is measured by one’s plain honesty and commitment to thankless toil. Ted Sandyman is Tolkien’s case-study here – a working class hobbit with aspirations beyond his station, who accordingly falls in with another social climber (Lotho) and ends up on the wrong team when Sharkey turns up. Ted wants to be something he’s not, just as Lotho wants to be something he’s not.

But wait… if the working class identity involves rejection of upward social mobility, how does one explain Samwise Gamgee’s rise to prominence? Sam becomes master of Bag End, and then subsequently Mayor – with no negative social repercussions. Well, yes. But one has to contrast Sam with his dark counterpart, Ted. Ted has aspirations and ideas, whereas Sam remains very much grounded. Sam has upwards social mobility thrust on him via the generosity and friendship of Bilbo and Frodo, rather than any innate desire to climb the social ladder, and when he does climb the social ladder, he gets away with it because (unlike Ted) he is so resolutely humble. Sam doesn’t marry upwards (he marries into working-class Cottons), and never picks up airs. That said, the Gaffer tells Sam in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t “hold with ironmongery whether it wears well or no.” Tolkien plays the scene for laughs – contrasting the epic adventure that has earned Sam this “ironmongery” with hobbit mundanity, but when considering the social code of The Shire, this is actually working class identity seeping through into the text. The Gaffer is rock-solid working class – from his viewpoint, this strange affectation Sam wears is to be distrusted.

Unfortunately, this notion of not having ideas beyond one’s station is pretty much the only way Tolkien engages with the working class in his portrayal of The Shire. Because there is a further flipside to the importance of “good honest toil”… working class respectability. Quite apart from affectations being out of place, shirking, or unseemly behaviour is also frowned upon – it is what distinguishes the respectable working class from the non-respectable working class, and as Terry Pratchett notes, when one is at the bottom of the social ladder, the space between the ladder’s rungs gets very significant. Tolkien only ever provides us with respectable working class hobbits (Gamgees, Cottons) – even the Sandymans (Sandymen?) fall into this category, since their fault is “big heads”, not laziness. We certainly never see hobbit beggars.

In terms of the text’s lack of engagement with working class respectability, while it may draw accusations that The Shire is excessively idealised, I think Tolkien can be defended on two grounds. Firstly, having a criminal underclass would not have improved the book – though the middle-class Lobelia actually does regard the Gamgees as potential midnight burglars, which just shows she does not understand how the working class operates. Secondly, Tolkien plays the class structure for gentle laughs. For all the darkness of the Sackville-Bagginses and Ted Sandyman, they are still creatures to be laughed at. Subtle jabs at a criminal underclass are a different matter.

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That concludes our look at The Shire’s class structure, and Tolkien’s engagement with social coding – the eccentricities of the Tooks and Brandybucks, the respectability of the Bagginses, the social climbing of the Sackville-Bagginses, and the salt-of-the-earth nature of the Gamgees, all of which have a particular reference to British cultural norms. There is much to unpack here, all the more so since, of course, the story spends most of its time outside The Shire. Far from neglecting class, Tolkien provides us with an elaborate (for a fantasy novel) referencing of the subject – not so much a critique, but at least a commentary.