Andy Duncan’s “Senator Bilbo”: Reflections on J. R. R. Tolkien and Matters of Race

Abstract This article examines the short story “Senator Bilbo” by fantasy writer Andy Duncan, in which the author provides a futuristic view of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, specifically the hobbits’ world of the Shire, in a setting which has become xenophobic and racist, excluding all those who are “other” than hobbits. The chief protagonist of the story, Senator Bilbo, is modelled on the American senator Theodore Bilbo, a mid-twentieth-century southern senator known for his segregationist views and writings on “miscegenation”. In the article I investigate how Duncan's character Senator Bilbo mirrors the real Senator Bilbo as he fails to adjust to the Shire's new attitudes to a multicultural Middle-earth— a view Tolkien supported—and how Tolkien's views on “race” were in fact non-racist and, in contrast to many ideologies of his time, advanced in terms of the acceptance of different cultures and ethnicities. In doing so I examine some of Tolkien's views on South Africa and how these ideas influenced his writing; I also explore the ways in which both segregation and apartheid were anathema to his worldview in the 1940s and 1950s, at the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings. I argue that Duncan's story is meaningful in showing how Bilbo Baggins's descendant can successfully realise that the hobbits of the Shire cannot, for all time, live in an isolated Shire but must, eventually, engage with other peoples.