Today is Tolkien Reading Day, or New Year’s Day (Fourth Age), or Lady Day (in the Middle Ages), or Why-haven’t-you-started-the-pepper-seedlings-yet Day (in the vegetable garden).

Over at “Middle-earth Reflections”, Olga has published an essay about the mystery of Tom Bombadil, with the usual quiet charm that wouldn’t be out of place in the drawing room of a hobbit hole. Over in the more boisterous hall at the Prancing Pony, Ed Powell asks what Alan and Shawn think Bombadil is doing in the story, and they give a typically-entertaining answer. Well, Idiosophers know a harmonic convergence when they see one, so in I shall jump.

I must confess right off, I don’t know where the mystery is. This is one of those (frequent) cases where people who study literature for-real say things that I just note without understanding. Tolkien told us in Letter #153 [1] what Bombadil is doing there:

… he is then an ‘allegory’, or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture.

So many of the characters in Middle-earth who seek knowledge are doing so for the sake of power, seeking dark secrets they can use against others, that one might be tempted to think Tolkien disapproved of the search for knowledge. Bombadil is a counter-weight to that. He knows all there is to know about his little realm, but it hasn’t turned him into a power-hungry maniac like Saruman or a resentful wretch like Gollum. He’s happy, playful, always goofing around.

You can find people like that in any physics department. When I was in college, it was Rolf Winter. He didn’t look much like Tom Bombadil, though (now that I think of it) he bore a resemblance to Ken Stott’s portrayal of Balin in the Peter Jackson movies.  Here’s a figure from Prof. Winter’s book Quantum Physics:

A world with only dark secrets would be unbalanced and considerably out of line with Tolkien’s own views. Tom Bombadil reassures us that a life of learning can be a joyful experience.

Works Cited

Carpenter, Humphrey. The Letters of JRR Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Winter, Rolf G. Quantum Physics. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1979

[1] N.B.: 153 has 3 digits. Raise each digit to the third power.
1^3 + 5^3 + 3^3 = 153. Numerology!

Joan Bushwell,  in an old piece called “The Tolkienian War on Science”.
(h/t Daniel Stride), explains Fëanor in a way that makes him (to me) almost sympathetic. I do have one big disagreement with the author, though. I’m on board when she calls Fëanor “the master smith/scientist/engineer”. But then she builds an analogy between Morgoth’s theft of the Silmarils and the current anxiety engineers have about intellectual property. No way. Fëanor is not upset about the theft of “intellectual property”. It’s clear that Fëanor gave away intellectual property freely – look at the alphabets for the best example. Silmarils are different. When Morgoth stole the Silmarils, Fëanor didn’t have them any more. In fact, he couldn’t even make new ones. They were like moon rocks or glacial core samples: literally irreplaceable, since we don’t fly to the Moon and the glaciers are melting.

“Intellectual property” is a bizarre legal fiction because it’s exactly the opposite of Silmarils. When (not “if”) intellectual property is stolen, the possessions of the developer are unchanged. The only thing the developer loses is the secrecy. The potential for profit.

Gandalf was fond of lecturing on topics like this, so pontification must not be too reprehensible. There are several reasons why people would want to own things and keep thieves away.

1. They need things to live their lives, e.g. a wheelchair or a craftsman‘s tools
2. A wish to preserve the things from harm
3. The pleasure of accumulating things
4. They want the status that possessions provide
5. To exploit them for advantage in battle or its modern equivalent, trade

JRRT approves of number 1: “Would you part an old man from his support?” (III,vi) JRRT approves of number 2: “It shall be set in imperishable crystal to be an heirloom of my house…”. (II, viii) [1]

Numbers 3 & 4 are deadly sins. I’m pretty sure Morgoth was working from one of these or the other.

Number 5 isn’t morally nailed down outside of LotR, but Faramir was unambiguous: “If it were a thing that gave advantage in battle, I can well believe that Boromir, the proud and fearless, often rash, ever anxious for the victory of Minas Tirith (and his own glory therein), might desire such a thing and be allured by it.” (IV, v) Either way, it is the only one of the five that we know wasn’t motivating Fëanor.

Maybe the whole debate over Fëanor can be boiled down to an argument over which motivation he thought he was acting on.

[1] Yes, I could have chosen more weighty quotations, but Idiosophy is a hobbitish discipline.  By the way, is anything else in Middle-earth “imperishable”?

Over at Earth and Oak, there’s an interesting discussion going on about how seeking after knowledge can destroy characters in Tolkien’s writing. The two that are held up for our inspection are Gollum and Saruman.

By chance, a wonderful contrast to Gollum just came across my twitter feed. The Japanese space agency has just landed a pair of rovers on an asteroid, and photos are coming in.  Gollum was disappointed to learn that ‘all the “great secrets” under the mountain had turned out to be just empty night…” (LotR, I, ii). Hayabusa 2 took off into the empty night, knowing perfectly well that there were things there “which have not been discovered since the beginning.” (ibid.) Let’s go find out what they are.

The surface of asteroid Ryugu. Source

I’ve joviated at length about how I disagree with JRRT about the morality of seeking knowledge. He seems to come down on it pretty hard in LotR, despite his interest in science in real life. [1] I think the resolution is one layer down: the problem is more about keeping things secret than about finding them out in the first place. C.S. Lewis was on about the same thing in That Hideous Strength, after all.

I feel confident that the team running the Minerva II1 rovers will not come to a bad end because they’re not trying to keep secrets.  Publishing discoveries the moment they come in is a foolproof antidote for any of the moral hazards faced by scientists.

You can guess what Idiosophers think about current intellectual-property law.

[1] Now that I think of it, why is breaking white light into its component colors foolish when Saruman does it, but a thing of beauty and wonder when the Men of Gondor divert a waterfall at Henneth Annûn?

Stephen Winter says a lot of nice things about Idiosophy over at Wisdom from the Lord of the Rings this week.

One thing I’d like to clarify: In case anyone concluded that the disjunctions in time in Middle-earth are a weakness in the story, I think they’re intentional. When Tolkien wanted his creation to resemble our world, he was careful to make sure his facts were correct. We have seen this in astronomy, botany, cosmology, ecology, and even in quantum physics.

But if there’s one discipline Tolkien didn’t respect, it’s economics. He went out of his way to break economic laws. The logic of economics is the logic of the Industrial Revolution, and Middle-earth was going to have none of it. So The Shire and Bree have money, but no government that coins it. The places with the most advanced technology are the ones with the lowest population density. Fast technological development in Isengard is the product of one single mind, not a collaborative community. All of these things contradict well-established economic theorems.

The one place I can think of where economic logic applies is in Lake Town. The stories people tell about the King Under the Mountain are a good application of Keynesian macroeconomics, but we readers are not encouraged to think of the Master and his guild-inspired community leaders as heroes.

That, I think, is the purpose of the steep time-gradients on the map of Middle-earth — to renounce Adam Smith and all his works. Faërie and Economics are natural enemies.