The Google Scholar search engine has been available for several years. It is not a generally useful search tool because it largely indexes subscription archives that are only available through educational and library institutions. Nonetheless, you can occasionally find some interesting research that is available to the public.
In my opinion, Google Scholar should allow the user to filter out the paywal/subscription sites with a simple filter. In my experience, you have to resort to tedious concatenation of query operators to block out the sites that want your money or which are simply too hoighty-toity to cater to the general public.
One of the worst offenses you’ll find in Google Scholar, however, is the plethora of listings from Google Books. While I think it’s cool that Google has scanned and indexed 15 million books, including references to millions of books that it is not permitted to share fully because of copyright protections is a nuissance.
I have often suggested that many Tolkien scholars fail to appreciate the finer details of Tolkien’s created world. You can use Google Scholar to confirm that this is still the case. However, to be fair to the vast majority of these writers, their goals are not to document Tolkien’s world but to analyze portions of it.
In a recent search that I conducted looking merely for Tolkien’s last name I found some odd obscure papers that I thought worthy of investigation.
If you are an Eowynist (someone who studies Eowyn in Tolkien’s literature) you’ll want to read this .PDF document by Hannah Woodward The Shieldmaiden of Rohan. Woodward presents Eowyn as both feminine and feministic and as someone who has been “marginalized by her culture but rises above her circumstances to achieve an astonishing victory in a different manner than expected.”
I’m not sure I would consider Eowyn to be culturally marginalized. She was assigned the responsibility of governing Rohan in Theoden’s absence. That hardly seems a marginal role to me. Her upbringing in Theoden’s household would have exposed her to all manner of Rohirric priorities and initiatives. As Theoden’s nurse in the months leading up to the War of the Ring she would also have been party to virtually every discussion of Rohan’s needs and capabilities that took place in Theoden’s presence.
It’s these seemingly trivial details that are seldom given much credit by writers who want to present a particular point of view rather than expose the reader to Tolkien’s fantastic imagination.
Another example of this sort of criterary projection comes from Matthew P. Akers’ “Distributism in the Shire” a paper that argues for a very subtle pro-Catholic economic theory in Tolkien’s Shire.
Distributism was proposed in the late 19th Century and perhaps somewhat refined in the early 20th Century. A distributist economy does away with both the socialist (state-owned) and capitalist (read = industrialist and corporate entity) economic institutions leaving only small property owners practicing local trade and enjoying limited land ownership.
The Shire might very seem to be Distributist in nature to people who study the economic theory except for the very large exceptions that Tolkien injected into Shire society. For example the Distributist model calls for a nuclear family household — and yet the “wealthy” families of the Shire sometimes kept many generations together in huge estates (e.g. the Tooks and the Oldbucks later Brandybucks).
Shire society is very clannish in nature and family names are closely associated with various folklands and regions. Also some regions of the Shire were more likely to engage in farming while other regions were less likely to do so. Most people might be surprised to learn there were quarries and mines in the Shire but Tolkien refers to them (sometimes obliquely).
The Shire is hardly — as Akers describes it — a pastoral paradise at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. It’s a rural backcountry that has lost much of the sophistication it might once have possessed. There is a tendency toward petty bickering over property and propriety — indications of class divisions and the consequences that come from the inequal distribution of wealth.
Bilbo Baggins is in fact a wealthy landowner and quite probably the landlord for Bagshot Row. That Bilbo is wealthy is stated. That he is a property owner (of Bag End) is stated. That he may be owner or more property than Bag End one may infer but the Baggins family wealth predates the injection of dragon-hoard wealth into Bilbo’s income. Sam’s special loyalty to Bilbo and Frodo implies a certain landlord-tenant relationship may exist; also Bilbo held his Farewell Party with impunity in the field next to Bagshot Row.
Land ownership beyond simple farming is well attested in the Shire but more importantly the institutions of state and caplitalism are also present. The Shire maintains at least three services: the Shirrifs the Bounders and the Post. There are inns and taverns scattered across the countryside but Otho and Lotho Sackville-Baggins go about the business of acquiring property and expanding their trade with the gusto of typical 19th Century Industrialists.
The Shire certainly undergoes some transformations through the story but it lacks many of the hallmarks of classic Distributism such as trade guilds. I think it’s fair to say that one can find traces of various economic theories in Tolkien’s Shire but to explain Tolkien’s world doesn’t require all these extravagant blendings of modern historical trends with a small selection of symbols from the stories.
Tolkien constructed a world that in his philologist’s mind would have progressed from certain points along a logical path toward certain other points. Tolkien’s literature is more about evolution than it is about economics. He wasn’t as concerned with condemning industrialization as he was about reminding the reader that evolution must still incorporate (and to a great extent rely upon) the choices of the individual.
Tolkien would have made a great Swarm Theorist and I would not be surprised to learn that linguists (and philologists) study Swarm Theory in order to find new ways to map and identify changes and progressions in language.
Who knows? Maybe if I keep scouring the archives of Google Scholar I’ll eventually find just such connections have been made by the academic community themselves.