… all economists are undead
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Even the marxists ones?
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To be fair (in the context of their culture) Merry and Pippin aren’t just wealthy people like Frodo – they are literal nobility – Merry is the son of the Master of Buckland and Pippin is son of the Thain (the official leader of the Shire even if he’s somewhat hands off). So they could probably legally order anyone around in the Shire.
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I do think it’s interesting that a significant (maybe just vocal?) portion of nerd-dom has shifted focus from exploring fantasy and sci-fi worlds to an effort to make them 100% internally logical and consistent, where everything must have an explanation other than “a wizard did it” and/or “because it was written that way.”
There just has to be a logical way the economy of Bree can sustain itself in a post-apocalyptic wilderness with no government or population centers, right!? And there must be an explanation of why Isildur has one, and only one heir after 3,000 years, right!? And dragons can fly because…
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The classics being: Do balrogs have wings? Does Aragon have a beard? Do balrogs have beards?
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… it can’t just be a gauzy reflection of the author’s vague memories of his own childhood
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That might change once Aragorn reestablishes the kingdom of Arnor and explains this thing called taxes.
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Killed by gollum, or so the fan theory goes.
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Bilbo and later Frodo owned an item worth “more than the whole Shire and everything in it”.
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Tolkien wasn’t a fan of anarcho-syndicalism, because they were against the Catholic Church during the Spanish Civil War.
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Some UK folk are old enough to know that this person was typically referred to as their “batman”. Which I will never stop finding funny for entirely the wrong reasons.
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i mean… duh.
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“Families for the most part managed their own affairs.”
Any time families are described as the basic unit of a political system it’s a pretty good bet that things are definitely totally idyllic in the places that social services isn’t looking…
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I very much need this to be the pitch for the next Benoit Blanc movie.
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There is an unfortunate tendency for these sorts of essays to be framed as REVEALING THE SURPRISINGLY DARK HIDDEN REALITY OF THE SHIRE or whatever, which is not the point I’m trying to make. When I write about the economics and politics of fictional worlds, it is usually because we, consciously or otherwise, base much of our understanding of the real world off of our perceptions of them. I think Tolkien was very aware of the sort of society he was depicting in the Shire, and that he was describing an idealized, imaginary version of it that never quite worked as well as one would hope.
Good point (sentence I bolded). This is why we should take pop culture seriously, because the relationship between fictional and reality are not all that clear…
[ETA] This too!
Tolkien liked to describe Middle-earth as a mythical lost past of our own Earth, and though that doesn’t really make any sense, it’s true he constructed his fictional universe from pieces of our own. That’s why I think this sort of analysis can be useful. By learning how the Shire worked, we can start to understand how our own past worked, in all its complexity and contradictions.
I think that’s important.
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I don’t think there’s any mention of courts or lawyers, and yet when Bilbo returned from the Lonely Mountain, he found he was presumed dead, his stuff auctioned off, and the Sackville-Baggins moving in.
It took him years to get everything straightened out and everything back, presumably though civil action.
And then when Bilbo “disappeared” again, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins arrived to examine the detailed legal inheritance documents, drafted by Bilbo, and was upset to find that everything was just so.
Which implies that Bilbo and Lobelia are lawyer-equivalents in the Shire.
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I think the term they used for Bilbo was “burglar”. 
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I just finished watching season 9 of Archer, which is set on an Island in 1938, and I loved how all the characters were obsessed with that book which had come out just the year before.
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Makes sense, rich dudes are the most likely to get away with crimes.
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Obsessive fandom?
One thing I’ve learned as a creative writer is never to be too specific about certain things at the start because it ties you down.
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