By Paul Esau (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 13, 2013
I’ve had to defend Tolkien against a number of assaults in my day.
I like to think of myself as Turin amidst the girdle of Melian, Gurthang in hand, waging endless war on the orcish neo-troglodytes of contemporary literary analysis. And yet no matter how many of the dirty little bastards I disembowel, there’s always a few dozen more on the horizon.
While the latest charge isn’t a direct attack on Tolkien, it does deal with Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, which is based on Tolkien’s book of the same title. It’s the result of an accusation from a California-based project called Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down! that The Hobbit’s (admittedly extensive) smoking scenes are a bad influence upon the impressionable youth of the world. The program uses trained primates (young adults, actually) between the ages of 14-22 to analyze tobacco content in movies and rate its seductive pull on innocent young minds.
“We’re taking the Hobbit to get some gold,” writes this particular reviewer before assigning grades to all aspects of tobacco usage in the film, “but not without a disgusting overused pipe that gives us cancer!”
I actually have a couple problems with this statement, even excluding the fact that “Hobbit” is not in fact a proper noun. I’ll spare my literary quibbles with the assumption that the quest is simply a heist to “get some gold,” and instead point out the stupidity of attempting to foster moral outrage over pipe-smoking practices in Middle Earth.
First of all, it’s somewhat naïve to assume direct correlation between fantastical fauna and its real counterpart. What are the hobbits smoking exactly? Tolkien never said, and while theories have been proposed (‘Weed!’ squeals a troglodyte in the moment before Gurthang tastes his blood), there is not definitive answer to this question. While I can see why an advocacy group would be concerned with any depiction that seems to mirror the harmful practice of tobacco smoking, the idea that ‘Old Toby’ and “Longbottom Leaf’ are simply “Marlboro” and “Camel” by other names is unsubstantiated. We have no idea if the plant smoked by the races of Middle Earth even contains significant levels of nicotine, and there is even less evidence for the assumption that it causes cancer.
Second of all, no man, woman, or child is ever seen smoking in The Hobbit. The only beings who light up are hobbits, dwarves, or wizards. Frankly, I have no idea what pipe-smoking does to the physiology of a wizard, and neither does anybody in California. Perhaps certain youth might be influenced to start smoking conventional tobacco products upon seeing hunky dwarves blowing smoke rings in Hobbiton, but that’s the same line of reasoning which links Halo to mass shootings in suburban USA. I’m not saying that such causation isn’t a possibility, simply that if we do choose to make a case for it there are significantly more important influences to control in Hollywood than chain-smoking dwarves.
Ultimately, The Hobbit isn’t a film that anti-smoking advocates should be concerning themselves with. Yes, Tolkien was a pipe-smoker, and yes, he did refer to ‘pipe-weed’ in his appendices as a probable variety of ‘nicotiana,’ but I doubt seeing a 73-year-old Ian McKellen puffing away in a pointy hat is going to seduce anyone into cigarette slavery. Channel your outrage somewhere else please, and leave The Hobbit alone.
