The Hobbit Industrialism

In bloemfontein, South Africa, on January 3, 1892, a man was born, his name was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Tolkien, a man who lived in two centuries, a man who has lived in a time when an American president John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the same man who lived through the Korean War, and through a time when two atomic bombs were dropped, desolating the cities of hiroshima and nagasaki in Japan, of course, in an effort to put the kibosh on the fighting in World War II has lived through a lot of things, but has still managed to publish two of the most well known fantasy novels on the planet, The Hobbit, and its follow up novel nearly 204 months later, The Lord of the Rings. Today J.R.R. tolkien is one of the most influential authors known …show more content…
The way John writes comes from his scholarly days at King Edward 6 school, his days enlisted in the world war, and his desire to write mythology for England. I bet what John saw in battle greatly affected some of the outcome of his novels to be, and it was not just the evils of war, but also the evils of industrialization. Wait, evils of industrialism? What evils? If you didn’t know, the entrepreneurs became filthy rich and their minions were working their butts off and getting paid little to nothing. With the creation of all these factories people began moving away from farmland and toward the cities around these factories, in turn this created a population boom without warning, with population growing out of control, trash began piling up on the streets and people began living in the slums. Slums were like very cheap and disgusting apartments. The slums had no toilets inside so tenants dug holes in the ground to relieve themselves. Rats were abound and trash was laid out on the floor, no one bothered to clean, almost as if it was supposed to be that …show more content…
The children living in these slums were forced to work and provide for the needs of their family. A typical shift would last between 12 and 16 hours that’s roughly twice the amount of time in a school day. Working during this period was tough, if you complained then you would no longer have a job. If you are anything remotely like me, you know these things aren’t just. How come the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Thinking like this brought about new ideas, the people wanted reform and so came the rise of socialism. Although tolkien was born just after the industrial revolution, Tolkien was still impacted by it, he saw the long term effects. The factories were powered by coal which caused pollution, Tolkien saw what happened to the environment and it shows in The Lord of the Rings. The loathsome creatures of middle earth take advantage of nature for their own gain, just like the entrepreneurs do to make money. One bad wizard, saruman, in The Lord of the Rings, destroys the land and builds an army. On the other side you have elves who care for the land. Sound familiar? It’s the battle between rich and