Tolkien's Shire Anarchy and the Mandate of Heaven
Rune Soup
Gordon White
4.7 • 861 Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2025
⏱️ 95 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, I'm welcoming fellow substacker and Tolkien nerd, Charles McBride, whose essay 'Shire Anarchy' caught my eye in the cultural curiosity that is the substack notes app.
We're diving into the political imagination behind Middle-Earth – a world where having a king is perfectly fine, as long as he's quite far away or, better yet, long dead.
From childhood obsessions with Tolkien to the strange bedfellows his work creates in modern fandom, Charles and I explore what it means when the villain of the story isn't a particular people, but the very desire for total control. How did this Franco-supporting Catholic writer end up crafting one of the most compelling visions of localism and self-governance in modern literature? And what might the hobbits teach us about freedom in an age of empire?
"I think Shire anarchy is best described in a sentence I wrote in the piece, where I said that all the affairs of hobbits are organized under the assumption that having a king was basically a good idea, so long as he was quite far away, or better yet, long dead. And I think that that kind of cuts to the heart of what this concept of Shire anarchy is. You have a society that holds a reverence for the past. And they believe that their system of political and social organization is derived from something authoritative in their deep, distant past."
Show Notes
Timestamps
02:00 - Charles' essay "Shire Anarchy" and initial connection
04:00 - Childhood experiences with Tolkien and homeschooling background
08:30 - Gordon's similar Tolkien childhood experiences
11:00 - Discussion of Substack platform and media evolution
14:00 - Tolkien's political views and introduction to "quiet radicalism"
15:30 - Explanation of Tolkien as an "anarcho-monarchist"
18:30 - Monarchy, pragmatism, and Tolkien's support for Franco
22:30 - The Ring as metaphor for power, greed, and capital
25:00 - Lord of the Rings' resilience against political appropriation
27:30 - Peter Jackson's film adaptation achievement
29:00 - Charles' viral thread about polarized Tolkien fandom
32:00 - CS Lewis vs. Tolkien on moral clarity and writing
35:30 - Lewis as a potential universalist and perennial philosophy
38:30 - Religious conversion, cultural identity, and belonging
42:30 - Modern politics, monarchy, and fascism as shadow kingship
45:00 - Definition and explanation of "Shire anarchy" concept
50:30 - Charles' personal political journey toward anarchism
54:00 - Political polarization and contemporary discourse
57:00 - Defining philosophical anarchism and attitudes toward hierarchy
59:30 - Religion as natural human function and political movements
63:00 - Discussion of The Hobbit movies and fan edits
69:00 - Concluding thoughts and where to find Charles online
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week, we welcome to the show fellow substacker and token nerd, Charles mcbride charles how you doing i'm well today |
| 0:23.4 | how are you yeah really good really good so we're chatting because you wrote a fantastic piece that |
| 0:30.8 | listen for people who are unaware substack has like cultural best practice that I do not abide by. |
| 0:37.6 | I use notes. |
| 0:39.0 | I note. |
| 0:39.9 | I waste time looking at notes. |
| 0:42.5 | And a good thing to because it was the notes that brought me Charles's fantastic essay, |
| 0:49.5 | Shire Anarchy. |
| 0:50.9 | So today we're talking about Tolkien and by the way, this is, I'm about to describe it |
| 0:56.4 | in a way that's boring, but the conversation is now going that way, token and politics and anarchist |
| 1:01.2 | thinkers and all the rest of it. Because there was so much in this amazing piece to resonate |
| 1:07.8 | with on a personal level, and I know from the listenership's perspective. |
| 1:12.8 | So I'm really excited for this conversation, and I'm very interested. |
| 1:16.9 | At the beginning of the essay, you tease some family Tolkien history. |
| 1:25.1 | You tease, like, he's a member of the family in his own way. So tell us about that, |
| 1:28.9 | Charles. Let's start there, like a childhood involving Tolkien. |
| 1:33.8 | For sure. What's actually interesting is I, that essay was part of a much broader essay that |
| 1:40.9 | included a great deal of my own personal reflections growing up in how Tolkien was woven |
| 1:47.2 | into my family's kind of literary and spiritual imagination. But I found that I hit about 4,500 |
| 1:53.2 | words on that and I was like, I can't let my substack readership have to deal with this. So I divided |
| 1:59.1 | it into two and the second part of that will come out |
| 2:01.7 | and be focused more on kind of kind of the concept of neighborhood democracy, but I'm going |
... |
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