Hobbits, D. H. Lawrence & the Subordination of the Individual

J. R. R. Tolkien begins The Lord of the Rings with a description of Hobbits as ‘an unobtrusive but very ancient people’ who love ‘peace and quiet and good tilled earth’. In Tolkien’s saga, Hobbits make interesting adventurers precisely because they are so unadventurous. In The Rings of Power, the motto of the Harfoots is ‘nobody goes off-trail, and nobody walks alone’.

Cautiousness and conformity ensures survival. But as Germaine Greer argues, this sort of system has its disadvantages:

non-conformism [in tight-knit communities] often proved intolerable, and the constant attention of the whole community to the actions of individuals had disadvantages more striking than the advantages. In such a community an old lady could not lie for four days at the foot of her staircase with a broken hip but a woman could not conduct a forbidden love-affair either. Nowadays people live closer together than ever before but it is overcrowded isolation

In the opening pages of his book, The Rainbow, which Rachel Cusk considers ‘among the most…