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Tolkien's Treasures: Marvellous Objects in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings

2019; West Virginia University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tks.2019.0005

1547-3163

Marie H. Loughlin,

Digital Media and Philosophy

Tolkien's Treasures:Marvellous Objects in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Marie H. Loughlin (bio) Tolkien's works have a persistent "fascination with the artefact," traceable to his view of his own creative art: "to him his fictions were what the Silmarils were to Fëanor or their ships to the Teleri, 'the work of our hearts, whose like we shall not make again'" (Shippey, Road 241). For Tolkien, "artificial things" are also dangerous, and their "love" is "the besetting sin of modern civilisation" (242), provoking "uncontrolled desire" and obsessive "covetousness" (Flieger, "Jewels" 66). Like Tolkien's global readers, however, Middle-earth's characters have views on the marvellous object that are fashioned by their specific cultures and histories; these contexts, in turn, shape different bodies of beliefs, ethics, and practices related to the creation and circulation of the marvellous object.1 Far from assuming some universal standard, in fact, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings explore the shifting cultural and ethical import of individuals' and people's affective bonds with precious objects, bonds that in turn express particular values, histories, and sensibilities. More than any other, the twin processes of gifting and preserving shape Middle-earth's marvellous artifacts and their special repositories as the sites where communities and nations are forged and remembered, and where the relationships between peoples and individuals are made the matter of memory, history, and in some cases, oblivion. Mathoms, Gifts, and Museums: Making Objects Mean in the Shire As the "museum at Michel Delving," the Shire's Mathom-house is a version of humanity's most conflicted of object-preserving institutions: the museum (FR, Prologue, i, 14). On the one hand, the museum has two laudable goals: to collect culturally significant global objects, preserving them from destructive forces and the depredations of time; and to display these objects, thus fostering broadly humanist and educational values (Hoberman 7–17). Deriving from the Latin museum [library or study], and the Greek mousa [muse] and mouseion [the seat of the Muses], the word's very etymology connects it with wonder, creativity, and learning. On the other hand, as many commentators have [End Page 21] pointed out, the museum preserves precisely by removing objects from the original contexts in which they were created and circulated, arguably resulting in the cultural death and even deliberate murder of such objects (Hoberman 17–22). Replacing these contexts with those of museum culture, its disciplinary apparatus, and often alien discourses about art, the museum is a place of death and entombment, frequently an extension of the colonial domination of these artifacts' original creators and users (Hoberman 1–6, 17–18).2 Full of dead or frozen things, the institution encourages visitors to fetishize, commodify, and exoticize the objects and cultures of the Other (Hoberman 24, 41–42); in turn, visitors are as likely to reify and dehumanize the objects' creators as they are to experience empathy or understanding (Hoberman 29). Even as the only museum in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, the Mathom-house hardly seems able to bear the weight of these serious issues.3 Briefly discussing weapons in the Shire, the narrator mentions that those "not used ... as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls" have been "gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom" (FR, Prologue, i, 14). In this description, the Mathom-house does seem to resemble the local museums of Tolkien's early twentieth-century experience: full of the "rubbish brought by resident gentlemen from all parts of the world," the local museum's "pictures and objects of natural history, sculpture and New Zealand war clubs" sat beside "the stuffed favourite pug-dog of a lady benefactor" and "an Egyptian mummy" (Burton 11), each item bearing the name of its donor. Reflecting the unstable value often assigned to these eclectic objects in local collections, Tolkien mischievously derives the Hobbit word mathom, meaning an object of uncertain value and use, apparently one step away from the trash heap...