Law and Arda

J.R.R. Tolkien famously wrote in his classic essay "On Fairy-stories" that to create a Secondary world in which a "green sun" was "credible, commanding Secondary Belief" was "story-making in its primary and most potent mode" (OFS 61). To create a truly successful Fairy-story, or work of Fantasy, the sub-creator must be able to seamlessly blend elements that firmly exist in the real world with elements that vary from the real world and exist solely in the secondary world, and do that in a way that is believable to the reader, who obviously brings with her a real world perspective. The term "green sun" has no meaning except in the context of the reader's knowledge of the yellow sun in the real world of her experience.

There have been a number of attempts to document different ways in which Tolkien has achieved this difficult goal. Kristine Larsen's extensive efforts to demonstrate the ways in which the astronomical dimensions of Tolkien's secondary world parallel that of the real world immediately come to mind.¹ There have been numerous other similar efforts to describe the physical elements of Middle-earth, whether botanical, or geologic, or geographic. ² There have also been a number of attempts to document the "philosophy of Middle-earth," and of course, unending discourses on the religious aspects of Tolkien's legendarium, as well as his borrowing from other myths and traditions, and the ways in which his various invented cultures and languages borrow from real world cultures and languages. Another example is John Garth's compelling descriptions of Tolkien's blending of his own experiences of war at the Somme in his fiction, particularly in the Dead Marshes chapter of The Two Towers, as well as the Hill of the Slain in The Silmarillion, which Garth describes as "a grand myth-maker's flourish with an alloy of realism" (Garth 18).

However, one area that has not been extensively discussed is the ways in which Tolkien gives his invented world an aura of realism through incorporating real world legal concepts into his fiction, blending and adapting them in order to fit into his secondary world, thus making his "green sun" that much more credible, and making secondary belief that much more possible. Any reasonably complex imagined society is going to have issues arise in which that society addresses how disputes and other interactions between individuals are resolved and regulated. These types of legal issues are of particular significance because of the relationship that law has with moral, philosophical and psychological concepts that are important in Tolkien's writings. As such, the way that he incorporates these legal concepts into his secondary world—and the way that this evolved over the course of the creation of his legendarium— is especially instructive.

Tolkien, of course, was not an attorney or a legal scholar, and there is no indication that he was any more familiar with the law than one would expect of an educated British man in the early to mid twentieth century. However, this does not render a study of his use of real world legal concepts less valuable (any more than the fact that he was not an astronomer renders Larsen's work uninstructive). In The Hobbit in particular he demonstrates a remarkably intuitive knowledge of legal concepts. However, it was when he transcended that understanding that his fiction really blossomed.

In their Introduction to Tolkien On Fairy-stories (their expanded edition of Tolkien's famous essay) Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson describe how Tolkien applied the lessons that he learned in writing the essay to improve his craft, particularly as seen in the advances from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings. They state, "All of these improvements can be subsumed under the heading of the most potent phrase in Tolkien's essay, "the inner consistency of reality." The Lord of the Rings has it; The Hobbit has it intermittently, but not consistently" (OFS 18). This evolution can be seen in the presentation of legal issues in the two works (and also the movement within The Lord...