[Bêthberry]

A very interesting thread, Esty, and a rare one, as I cannot recall seeing this topic discussed in the ancient days of the Barrow.

Selmo's response about the class-riddled nature of the English society upon which Tolkien based his Shire is a good point. It reminds me of a book I read as a youngster about young Victoria, someday queen and empress. Her tutors had been forbifdden to tell her where she stood in line to the throne but as she was filling out, at the age of 11, her personal family tree upon the death of her uncle George (the IV), and writing in Uncle William now as William IV, she asked her tutor how she should fill out heir apparent. At that point, her tutor broke with his instructions and informed her to write in her own name. What a welcome to puberty that must have been.

Yet who outside the British nobility and aristocracy kept family geneologies? In many Protestant families, family Bibles were used to record marriages, births, deaths--and how fitting, considering how often "begats" form the record of the early books of the Bible. Yet I don't think the record of family histories is so easily traced for the lower classes.

Yet kinship is a fascinating topic, for that is essentially what geneologies trace. And kinship became a focus of formal study only in the late Victorian era and was predominant in anthropology in the early twentieth century, when Tolkien was himself an academic involved in, if one may say, the geneology of languages. Certainly his own created languages display an interest in language trees.

For anthropology of the early twentieth century, studying kinship systems was limited to studying early cultures, not the so-called modern Western cultures. So study was focussed on such societies as the various Aboriginal tribes of North America, Inuit groups in the north, south Pacific societies, and some African and Australian groups. Was Tolkien influenced by this focus on so called "primitive" cultures to give his hobbits an extensive kinship system, as a way of differentiating them from the elevated societies of elves? If so, he does not really give us much sense of what obligations this kinship created, of what obligations were involved in the organising of society this way. We know that Bilbo adopted his nephew Frodo upon the death of Frodo's parents. And we know something about the Sackville-Baggins' view of the kinship, which seems to have developed through extensive intermarriage. But we aren't really sure if degrees of kinship are related to inheritance or succession or how they created, if at all, patterns of behaviour in The Shire.

In a recent post (which I don't have time to find at the moment), Squatter of Amon Rudh suggested that the hobbits were a faulty society which had forgotten their mythological origins, a form of learning and history not forgotten in Gondor. If one accepts this valuation, it does seem that the hobbits' interest in family trees is regarded as a petty learning. Yet we do know how Arwen was related to Aragorn and that she was lost to history upon her death--having chosen mortal men. The elven kinship seems clearly related to inheritance and succession and we don't know if the non-ruling elven families had the same interest in family trees that hobbit families had.

So, was Tolkien merely borrowing the anthropological focus on indigenous cultures to characterise his hobbits? Or was something more involved, something which would prompt a Frodo to accept an obligation to preserve the group?