I recently received a very nice hard back edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings as a gift. I last read this work when I was 13 years old and have wanted to read it since the film versions came out, but never got around to it.
I like to do a little research upon an author following a reading of them. It is helpful to understand a little of the private interests and passions of an author to understand why they care so much about their literary creations, and work so hard upon them.
I found it interesting that Wikipedia's biography of J.R.R. Tolkien had to use a picture of him from 1916 in military uniform, when he was an unknown and only 24 years old. The only other picture of him on the Wikipedia bio was of Tolkien in 1911, when he was 19.
The probable reason that Wikipedia could not, or would not use a more appropriate picture of J.R.R. Tolkien, one that showed him during the time he became known to the world outside of the University of Oxford for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is because there aren't many close-up photos of him without a tobacco pipe in or near his mouth.
Usually, a Wikipedia entry displays, or should display the first defining photo as the one that shows the person as they are most known and recognized by the world, not as they looked in childhood or as a teen. The childhood photos, should be relegated to the section pertaining to childhood. If the bio is describing Bette Davis or some movie star known for her good looks, the defining picture should be one that shows her at her peak, not one that shows her as an old hag. A picture of the youthful Albert Einstein would not be the defining image the world has. It would look out of place and odd when we all know he had unkempt white hair. Perhaps, Einstein carried his pipe a bit lower than Tolkien which allowed for the illusion that he was a tobacco-free thinker.
J.R.R. Tolkien was born in 1892 and died in 1973, which means he lived to be 81 years old. If he hadn't smoked he would've lived forever and The Lord of the Rings would look quite different (although, in the literary world one's creation is considered to make one immortal). I wonder if writing about Hobbits smoking tobacco qualifies as 2nd or 3rd hand smoke? And why does he look so much happier with the pipe than without it? He's probably glad he's not stuck on a piece of our modern PhrankenPharma nicotine gum.
Unlike the film version, which depicts the victorious Hobbits returning to their peaceful and untouched home in the Shire, the book shows an entirely different picture. Tolkien shows that the last battle is the one closest to home.
In the final chapters of the book, the Hobbits; Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry return home to the Shire after having gone to Hell and back, saving the earth from the dark evil of Sauron by tossing the Ring of power into the depths, forever cutting Sauron off.
The Hobbits return home to find gates across the roads, Rules which dictate the lives of the Shire; preventing the inhabitants from lighting fires, freely travelling, sharing food or home with strangers; and that beer and tobacco are no longer allowed for use amongst the common folk, being reserved only for the few who lord over them. Anyone that breaks a rule or speaks up is confined in the Lockholes by the Shirriffs who enforce the Rules.
There is general poverty amongst the people and the land. The homes have been burned down and ugly row houses line the road where once beautiful trees grew. The gardens have gone to weed, and the new mill belches out dirt that pollutes the river and air. The wizard, Saruman, has decided to set up a monopoly over the lives of the Shire Hobbits, which began innocently enough with a prohibition upon beer, but escalated to every aspect of life.
Merry wonders "What's the matter with this place?" ("The Scouring of the Shire," The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien).
One of the native Hobbits explains: "We grows a lot of food, but we don't rightly know what becomes of it. It's all these 'gatherers' and 'sharers', I reckon, going round and counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again" ("The Scouring of the Shire").
"[O]n every wall there was a notice and a list of Rules. Pippin tore them down. There was no beer and very little food, but with what the travellers brought and shared out they had a fair meal; and Pippin broke Rule 4 by putting most of next day's allowance of wood on the fire.
"'Well now, what about a smoke, while you tell us what has been happening in the Shire?' he said.
"'There isn't no pipe-weed now,' said Hob; 'at least only for the Chief's men. All the stocks seem to have gone.....'" ("The Scouring of the Shire").
"'No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and lots of rules....'" ("The Scouring of the Shire").
"'There's hundreds of Shirriffs all told, and they want more, with all these new rules'" ("The Scouring of the Shire").
Sounds a bit like my town and the rest of the country. The bigger the jails, the larger the police force the more criminals are invented. In the United States of America one is lucky if they have never been arrested or jailed. At least, 1 out of every 25 people is jailed in their lifetime, far exceeding Russia or China.
Many good people are sitting in our jails and prisons at this moment, some for traffic or parking tickets. In a jail not far from me sits a grandfather who loves his grandchildren and became their guardian when the children's mother (his daughter) became a neglectful drug addict. He protested Social Services constant and intrusive visits to his house to make sure he was taking care of the children and was arrested for standing up for his rights and family. He committed no crime other than doing the right thing and for telling Social Services to stop coming to his house.
"'So things went from bad to worse. There wasn't no smoke left, save for the Men; and the Chief didn't hold with beer, save for his Men, and closed all the inns; and everything except for Rules got shorter and shorter, unless one could hide a bit of one's own when the ruffians went round gathering stuff up 'for fair distribution': which meant they got it and we didn't....'" ("The Scouring of the Shire").
The four Hobbits, returned from battles, set about "raising the Shire," and waking the inhabitants from their sleep and powerless condition. They route out Saruman's thugs, although not without some loss of life. The Shire was ready to overthrow the Rules and those that forced them to live in a world "fair" only to the greedy. When we hear the words "fair" and "unfair" we need to ask what exactly is meant by these words, for most often they are employed by mean misfits of society.
After freeing the captives from the Lockholes, Frodo is appointed Deputy Mayor until the Mayor is properly recovered from his time in prison. Frodo promptly lays off the majority of Rule enforcement:
"The only thing that he did as Deputy Mayor was to reduce the Shirriffs to their proper functions and numbers" ("The Grey Havens," The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien).
Not only did the Hobbits save the earth from Sauron, an equivalent to our Satan, but they introduced Middle-Earth to tobacco smoking. The Prologue of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings details a bit of the history of this "art" in the section entitled "Concerning Pipe-weed":
"There is another astonishing thing about Hobbits of old that must be mentioned, an astonishing habit: they imbibed or inhaled, through pipes of clay or wood, the smoke of the burning leaves of a herb, which they called pipe-weed, or leaf, a variety probably of Nicotiana. A great deal of mystery surrounds the origin of this peculiar custom, or 'art' as the Hobbits preferred to call it....
"And certainly it was from Bree that the art of smoking the genuine weed spread in recent centuries among Dwarves and such other folk, Rangers, Wizards, or wanderers, as still passed to and fro through that ancient road-meeting. The home and centre of the art is thus to be found in the old inn of Bree, The Prancing Pony....
"Hobbits first put it into pipes. Not even the Wizards first thought of that before we did. Though one Wizard that I knew took up the art long ago, and became as skilful in it as in all other things that he put his mind to."
How much longer before this book is banned for its universal message of liberty and of overcoming evil? How much longer before it is censored and conveniently forgotten, along with so many other great works of literature? Will our children and grandchildren find this book, complete and as its author wrote it? Already, its author's image is being censored, in a way typical of Soviet Russia, when it commonly erased images of those no longer politically correct. And pipe-weed is nearly banned in favor of Saruman's Phake Pharma Nicotine monopoly of patches, gums, lozenges, inhalers, and other patented "therapies" for those that enjoy life too much.
images: J.R.R. Tolkien
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