Tolkien

Goblin Town mirrors the chaotic Victorian Birmingham of Tolkien’s youth—a dark maze where inhabitants love machines and inventive cleverness but create only weapons and torture devices. The bow-legged, squint-eyed goblins resemble rickets-ridden factory workers who rarely saw sunlight. Their rhythmic songs echo industrial machinery.

Rivendell introduces Elrond’s crucial moon-map revelation — divine intervention or “you create your own luck by taking action.” The dwarves started their quest without complete information, yet moving forward allowed essential details to emerge naturally.

Tolkien’s trolls speak in working-class dialect and defeat themselves through argumentative bickering—showing how evil lacks socialist cooperation.

The Hobbit begins in Tolkien’s unconscious socialist vision—Bilbo lives comfortably without employment or employers, free from government coercion. Gandalf organises a volunteer collective to restore stolen dwarf property. It’s perfectly democratic: equal opportunity quests with no compulsion to participate. This egalitarian environment brings out people’s best qualities, showing how freedom and choice enable personal growth and solidarity.

Tolkien unconsciously embedded socialist values in his work. He’s one of the twentieth century’s most socialist writers, despite his conservative beliefs.

How I Read The Hobbit as a Socialist Story (And Completely Missed the Point)
As a child, I saw Tolkien’s world as gloriously secular—no churches, no God, just folklore creatures the Church opposed. Bilbo’s anarchic society without government or hierarchy seemed like progressive utopia. Only later did I discover Tolkien was a conservative Christian medievalist — oh well.