Prologue
In the prologue, we are given a description of the hobbits, the small folk who play such a significant role in the tale. The story begins and ends in the Shire. The protagonist, Frodo, is innocent and insignificant when the saga opens in the peaceful village, but returns at the end as wounded, conflicted, and wise. While he is away, the area is ravaged, and the freedom and carefree nature that characterized it are replaced by tyranny. Frodo and his companions restore order upon their return, but life is never the same. This is the essence of The Lord of the Rings.
The hobbits’ world is tied to the Mother, yet, just as a fish does not relate to water in any particular way, the hobbits do not have a conscious relationship with her. In fact, there is no actual “mother” in the Shire. It is a world of boys. They live in peace and freedom, are small and round, enjoy food and drink (which seem to exist in abundance) without guidance or rules. The good, all-powerful Mother provides everything so that the boys need not worry about anything. Indeed, they are naive, unaware of what happens in the world beyond their own land, not least because they avoid “the Big Folk.”
The big folk are, of course, humans, and since the tale is so dominated by men, we can assume that this neutral term actually refers to adult men. The hobbits want nothing to do with them. They avoid adult men because these would disrupt their mother-bound life. In the prologue, we learn that the hobbits avoid the big folk by “disappearing.” We also learn that the hobbits have a particularly intimate relationship with the earth - that is, the mother - and it is precisely this relationship that helps them hide from the gaze of adult men.
As we will see, disappearing is central to this universe. It can be something positive, such as escaping danger, but also something profoundly negative. To disappear is to dissolve, which is always the risk one runs - as we will see time and again - in the proximity of the Great Mother. The tale concerns this dissolution into the bosom of the mother archetype, the unconscious, versus conscious individuality. We have two forces in this universe - the feminine and the masculine (to be understood in accordance with the principles of yin and yang, not female and male). Neither of these is good or evil in itself, but one-sidedness leads to a dangerous reaction.
The tale thus begins in the bosom of the Good Mother, where the hobbits wish to remain. They live in earthen holes and want nothing to do with machines or other masculine expressions. They preferably do not use thrusting weapons like swords or spears in battle, but rather ranged weapons, such as bows - traditionally a feminine weapon - or they simply “disappear” in the face of danger, like children pulling the blanket over their heads or hiding behind their mother’s skirts. When the danger has passed, they return to their leisurely life in their low, round buildings with round windows and doors, tending to their gardens between constant meals.
Thus, the hobbits live their lives in the blissful unconsciousness of the Great Mother. But this is only the prologue, the introduction or the situation. Something is bound to happen; a masculine impulse begins to stir in the Shire. Already in the prologue, we hear of gathering storm clouds at the border of this paradisiacal hobbit world. Reports come of strange creatures lurking along the border, “a first sign that all was not as it should be, and as it had always been.”[1] This is significant. On one hand, we understand that everything should be as it has always been - a central theme in the tale - and on the other, that something is rebelling against this mother-bound unconsciousness. In short, the feminine, yin, the mother-bound, is characterized by overarching unconsciousness, while the masculine, yang, the father-bound, is to a greater extent dominated by consciousness. These are not value judgments, but two complementary forces that only take on a negative value through one-sidedness. The hobbits’ world is highly one-sided, and therefore an impulse will strive to balance this; “strange creatures at the border” is the first, unassuming symptom. “Not even Bilbo understood what it foreshadowed,” the author reveals.
The symbolic significance of the hobbits living in holes beneath the ground cannot be emphasized enough. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are intuitively written works, as we will describe in more detail later; the tales and their developments came to Tolkien from an inner, unconscious source, like a stream of images akin to a dream. The first words Tolkien wrote for the tale were: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” He comments in a letter: “I did not know, I do not know, why.”[2] We can already see here that the story was not an “invention” of the author, and that their dwellings beneath the ground were the first image that came to him. In fact, “hobbit” means just that, according to Tolkien, “those who live in holes.”[3] That is, those who have not been born.
These small people, representing children, thus live in the womb of the earth. Nature does not allow the child to remain there; it must be born, emerge from Mother Earth. Frodo, as a character in the tale, has already been born, as we know, but here we speak of the second birth. This is a universal image that recurs in initiation rites, but also in mystical contexts as enlightenment. Only one who has been born twice is a true human, according to these universal notions. One who has only been born of his mother remains a child, which is, so to speak, unnatural. Therefore, nature, represented by the old wise man Gandalf, will urge the child to leave the mother’s bosom and become an adult man through initiation. It will be difficult and painful.
Thus, we have a conflict between two archetypal forces: the Mother and the Father. The latter seeks to help the boy break the bond with the mother and become an independent individual; to, in Jung’s terms, individuate. The bond that must be broken is represented by the ring.
“[The] many forms of rebirth rites show that it is … an archetypal idea, [so] it always comes back again in one form or another. If we live at all, we will always seek the fulfilment of the archetype of rebirth…”[4]
Footnotes
[1] We have based our work mainly on the Swedish translation of the saga and written the texts in Swedish. These have then been translated into English. We have not always checked that the Lord of the Rings quotes are accurate in relation to the English original. Since the book exists in so many editions in both Swedish and English, we do not concern ourselves with page references for quotes.
[2] J.R.R Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 215.
[3] Ibid., p. 405.
[4] Carl Gustav Jung, Jung's Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Abridged Edition). Edited and abridged by James L. Jarrett. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 37.