Yavanna and the Hobbits

What would late Third-Age hobbits have thought of Yavanna Kementári, and what would she have thought of them? It's harvest time in the Green Hill Country, and you're seeing my thought of how the Little Folk might have imagined this august servant of the One. Of course, they are not actually seeing one of the Valar kneeling amidst their wheat fields, orchards, and smials any more than most of us expect to encounter a personification of Mother Nature in our gardens. Yet, at least some hobbits knew something about the Valar.

This is evidenced in the Woody End when Frodo recognizes the elves' hymn to Elbereth. The subject of hobbit theology is too little attested for any sound conclusions, but hobbits like Bilbo and Frodo understood some part of elven lore, even before Bilbo's Rivendell translations. I expect the volumes that made up the Red Book of Westmarch further expanded hobbit knowledge of spiritual matters, at least in some circles. This is one of the subjects about which I wish Professor Tolkien had written so much more, but I think there is good reason to feel that hobbits would have loved anything they learned about Yavanna Kementári, Giver of Fruits.

Life in the Shire is absolutely centered on the growing and eating of plants. It is the grain mill which anchors Hobbiton and one of the most jubilant interludes in local history was the Great Year of Plenty, in which the hobbits found themselves flooded with astounding crop yields.

If it's not presumptuous to make a suggestion, I suppose that hobbit ideas of Yavanna might have stemmed from the kind of love they had for their own mothers whose hope was to nourish them with abundance six times a day, whenever possible. Bounty and hobbit happiness go hand-in-hand, and I think Shire-folk would have felt full of thanksgiving for whatever powers made their home a land of plenty.

As for Yavanna, it's my hope that she might have come to love the little hobbits in the Elder Days. We read of how nearly all of the Valar adore the elves when Eru reveals them as his first-born children, but later, Yavanna is stricken with grief in realizing that the dwarves will fell her defenseless and beloved trees. Though the creation of the ents is of some comfort to her, it must be admitted that hobbits, too, would have felled Yavanna's trees and eaten her beautiful plants. Her role as the sower of Arda's first seeds makes her especially protective of the olvar - the plant kingdom.

I can only hope that, like Olórin, Yavanna spent time with Nienna and learned to take pity on small mortal beings like the hobbits, who are obliged to sustain themselves with the fruits of the earth. Perhaps, in time, Yavanna would have seen that these small people didn't needlessly injure nature unless they were frightened by something like alarming trees. Might she have learned to delight in the special relish with which hobbits received her bounty? Might she not have smiled over the way in which a hobbit like Bilbo loved her flowers?

There is always a balancing act in nature, and if some trees were felled to make paper for hobbit lore-books, their pages were filled with their authors' intent observations of the natural world. Think of The Lord of the Rings, and how passage after passage exurberantly records hobbit wonder over trees, flowers, herbs, fruits, and vegetables. It is like a log book of the works of Yavanna, written with a special reverence for the green world.

I hope that she understood them in time, and grew in mercy for their humble mortality. Even the elves were obliged to consume some of the natural world while they lived in it, and in the hobbits, I think Yavanna might have discovered that this small branch of the second-born children of Eru was a people after her own heart.

Please enjoy these scenes of a blessed state of plenty amid harvest in the Shire: