What if Tolkien's Dwarves were marsupials?
(This post has been moved here from my opinions blog. It was originally published on November 26, 2020)
Tolkien’s Dwarves as a hypothetical remnant population of undiscovered marsupial humanoids coexisting with multiple hominid lineages alongside a technologically advanced, spacefaring civilization in ice-age Sundaland: A speculative thought experiment in fictionally derived paleoxenoethnogeography [Is that a word? It is now.]
In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, multiple races of intelligent beings co-existed in a land called Middle Earth in some distant era of the past lost to history. These races, as is commonly known, included Men, Elves, Hobbits, Orcs, and Dwarves.
Tolkien's work is, of course, a work of fiction inspired by Medieval Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology, and is said to be set in "the old world" i.e. Europe in the distant past, ostensibly during some sort of warm, unidentified interglacial period, as pointed out by scholars such as Paul H. Kocher. This is the traditional interpretation, implied and encouraged by Tolkien himself, that is almost universally accepted in the scholarly community.
The intent of this essay, by contrast, is to speculatively reassign the location of Middle Earth to the now-inundated ice age peninsular landmass known as Sundaland, located on the continental shelf surrounding present-day Malaysia and Indonesia.
I also propose that the races inhabiting Middle-Earth can be interpreted to represent both actual and hypothetical hominid and prehistoric human populations. I further propose that one of these races, the Dwarves, can be construed to represent a remnant population of undiscovered humanoid marsupials, and that another of these races, the elves, represent a civilization of long-lived, technologically advanced, spacefaring humans whose accomplishments have been lost to history through a combination of natural disasters and catastrophic post-glacial inundations.
I seek to accomplish this by utilizing a combination of methods, namely: speculative xenobiology, pseudoscientific paleoarchaological assumptions, reinterpretation of elements of Tolkien's writings through a number of well-worn science fiction tropes, a generous stretching of the imagination, and, most importantly, a nearly complete disregard for Tolkien's actual literary intent.
The case for Sundaland as a location for Middle-Earth contradicts everything Tolkien ever said or implied about it in his writings. But if we conveniently ignore this literary reality, Sundaland offers a number of tempting features. Its equatorial location works quite well with the name "Middle-Earth." Between Asia in the north and Sahul (Australia/New Guinea) in the southeast, it can be quite literally described as "the land in the middle".
Furthermore, Sundaland's varied topography offers extensive mountain ranges (present-day island chains) Anduin and Brandywine-like rivers (now submerged) and the flat lands in between (also now submerged.) Tectonic activity in the earth's crust in the area gives rise to widespread volcanism, which is useful for explaining Mount Doom and the land of Mordor, which could easily be an area devastated by any number of sizable eruptions. One might suppose that, during the height of the ice age, parts of the equatorial region may have had a cooler, more temperate climate, more suited to the story of the Lord of the Rings than is currently found in present-day Indonesia.
When it comes to the variety of intelligent races in Middle-Earth, prehistoric Sundaland has a lot going for it. Modern humans arrived in the area more than 50,000 years ago, and other hominids were known to the area for much longer than that. The most famous and obvious of these is, of course, Homo Florenseis, the "real" hobbits of recent anthropological fame. Another race of men known to have inhabited Sundaland were the Denisovans, a fairly recently discovered subspecies whose DNA still persists in the indigenous Melanesians, Australian Aborigines, and natives of Papua New Guinea. To fill the role of the Easterlings and Southrons, these ancient Denisovans and their mixture in local populations would fit the bill nicely.
And now we come to the Orcs. One hominid species known to inhabit the area in prehistory was Homo Erectus. Since H. Erectus, of Java Man fossil fame, persisted nearly to the time of our own species in the geological timeframe, it only requires a small amount of the good old what-if-they-survived-longer-than-we-thought trope, frequently used in sci-fi alternate histories, to place them alongside Men and Hobbits in our reimagined Middle-Earth. A crudely industrialized population of H. Erectus with good metallurgy and weapons technology and a taste for 'long pork' would serve quite nicely as a species whose contact with humanity would engender mutual repulsion, mutual hatred, and fierce competition for resources; everything necessary to fill the role of an Orc army. I'm not the first person to come up with this idea. The Asylum, a low-budged direct-to-video film company, used this concept in their infamous mockbuster “Age of Hobbits” (later renamed to “Clash of Empires/Lord of the Elves” due to a lawsuit,) but it works well for my purposes as well.
With Hobbits, Men, and Orcs covered, we are left with Elves and Dwarves. Let's set aside the immortal elf problem for a moment, and talk about Dwarves. Or more specifically, Marsupial Dwarves.
Now, this notion may seem utterly preposterous and unnecessary on the surface, but let's think about it for a moment. In Australia, the absence of placental mammals for most of its geological history meant that nearly every single ecological niche ordinarily filled by placental mammals was instead filled by a marsupial equivalent. For most placental mammal groups, there is, or once was, a marsupial analogue, often bearing a striking resemblance to its placental counterpart through convergent evolution. This applies to many types of mammal, with the notable exception of hominids. It’s a tempting variation on the sci-fi trope of alternate human lineages to speculate on a marsupial human species; no doubt many writers have already come up with a similar idea. But what if Tolkien’s Dwarves were such an evolutionary analogue?
The first piece of evidence for a marsupial origin for the Dwarves is the fact that the females are often mistaken for males. The Peter Jackson films portrayed this fact as mainly centered on facial appearance, as evidenced in the dialogue in The Two Towers, while the bearded extras portraying female dwarves fleeing Smaug’s destruction in the Hobbit films had a recognizably female figure. But the fact that females are mistaken for males would be even more easily explained with marsupials, because the mammary glands in female marsupials are contained inside a pouch on the abdomen. Such a pouch could easily be hidden underneath clothing, provided the female dwarf did not have young residing in the pouch at the time. A lack of visible differentiation in secondary sexual characteristics in the upper body, meaning no mammaries in the pectoral region, would contribute greatly to a confusion of the sexes in the eyes of outside observers.
It would follow that the dwarves, secretive as they are about their language and culture, would be even more secretive about their unique reproductive process. They would, for both safety and secrecy reasons, likely keep nursing females hidden deep in some sort of maternity section of the mine or cave system where they reside, not permitted to visit the outside world until the young have permanently left the pouch.
Another secondary sexual characteristic of human females that would be absent in a marsupial hominid equivalent would be wide hips. As marsupial young first leave the uterus and migrate over to the pouch in a tiny, underdeveloped form, there is no evolutionary need for an expanded pelvic space to accommodate gestation and childbirth as we know it. Thus, such an absence of wide hips would also reinforce the superficial lack of differentiation between male and female Dwarves.
The second piece of evidence that Tolkien's Dwarves could be marsupials is the conspicuous lack of interbreeding between Dwarves and the other humanoid races of Middle-Earth. While Elves, Men, and Orcs have all crossbred with varying degrees of reproductive success, I have never encountered a half-dwarf character of any sort in what I have read so far of Tolkien's writing. This would place the Dwarves much further away from Men, genetically, than any other group. Tolkien himself stated that "the Dwarves are a race apart," and a marsupial origin fits well enough in that category. Granted, I did not encounter any half-hobbits in The Lord of the Rings, either, but hobbits are well established as humanity's closest kin in Middle-Earth, and there's certainly no fun in challenging that fact.
And yet the Dwarves’ appearance and behavior being so close to that of men, it is a similarity that could very easily be explained by convergent evolution on the Australian continent. It would not be inconceivable, given the right set of environmental circumstances, for tree-dwelling marsupials in the koala family to evolve apelike features, and, as the continent continued to dry out, further evolve into a grassland-dwelling bipedal analogue to hominids. There is, of course, no evidence in the fossil record for any of this, but the enjoyment of heroic fantasy fiction requires suspension of disbelief, and this alone is sufficient to account for such a contradiction.
The mysterious origin of the Dwarves, beginning with the legendary Durin, who "woke and walked alone," is compatible with the idea that the entire population of the species is descended from a tiny founding population, perhaps only a few scattered individuals, who, escaping xenocidal extinction in Australia and then-connected New Guinea at the hands of the invading humans, managed to survive and then thrive in secret in Sundaland. The mythical origin of Durin in the east would also line up roughly with New Guinea’s position relative to Sundaland. Keeping their marsupial origin a secret would have been key to the Dwarves’ survival, at least until their numbers were large enough to adequately defend themselves and obtain a foothold in their preferred underground dwellings.
The orcs, of course, were the dwarves’ direct competitors for this underground habitat. While H. Erectus itself would have been a species in decline against the encroaching H. Sapiens populations, they likely would have harbored an even more brutal hatred against the dwarves, as it is not unheard of in modern society for one oppressed population to turn its frustrations against another even more marginalized population. A clever survival tactic for critically threatened marsupial humanoids would be to ally themselves with men —the stronger of the two hominid species— in order to escape the brutality of the weaker. And yet, this alliance of dwarves and men would have its limits, due to the likelihood of H. Sapiens to unleash their destructive tendencies against their dwarf allies once orc threat was no longer present. This would likely contribute even more to the dwarves’ secretive and suspicious nature.
And what shall we say of the elves, those immortal beings who are the most fantastical and mythical of all of Middle-Earth’s inhabitants? Taking a page from the well-worn playbook of the pseudoscientific fields of “forbidden archaeology” and “ancient astronaut” theorists, I propose that such beings could likely be explained as a population of H. Sapiens who, in ice-age isolation from other populations, may have, through sheer luck and good fortune, discovered clean energy technologies such solar and geothermal power, and moved on to other such things as fusion reactors, bypassing the fossil-fuel stage of industrialization, rapidly developing into a technologically advanced, spacefaring civilization far surpassing even our own. Imagine that this post-scarcity utopia in isolation happens to have just the right balance of religious restraint and logical wisdom to avoid the kind of disastrous colonial and trade policies enacted by our own industrialized nations. It is not inconceivable that such people, with their great wisdom tempered by ecological humility and their lives prolonged by advanced medicine and biotechnology, could appear almost godlike to less-advanced human societies. Such advances in medicine, when combined with spacefaring technologies of suspended animation and the time dilation effects of near-lightspeed space travel, would achieve at least the functional appearance of immortality in the eyes of earthbound humans. And their technology would be so far advanced that it would be beyond the comprehension of other men, regarded as magic, therefore preventing the premature spread of potentially destructive advancements among other human cultures.
Such a population of “elves” could be postulated to have been some distant ancestor of the Indus Valley civilization, on the now-submerged continental shelf of India, separated an ocean away from Sundaland, further adding to their mythical mysteriousness of their “undying lands.”
The island of Númenor would have been a colonial outpost of this civilization, perhaps chosen as an equatorial location for a space elevator. The men of Númenor would be a colonial hybrid of the local population with the advanced beings from across the sea, enjoying long life due to advanced medicine, but perhaps belonging to a lower caste, prohibited from enjoying the life-stretching effect of interstellar travel. Such a caste would inevitably rise up in rebellion against the colonizers, and attempt to take their utopian homeland as their own, just as Ar-Pharazôn did when he sent his fleet to conquer the undying lands. And imagine their surprise when their island kingdom is destroyed in a Krakatoa-like volcanic disaster, their island collapsing into a flooded caldera, wiping out the fleet in a massive tsunami. With the space elevator toppled and lost in the disaster, all contact with the more advanced elves would have been cut off. The scattered refugees of this colony would be left behind to seek refuge with and eventually assimilate into the local population of humans. The inhabitants of their mother country, meanwhile, would resume their isolated utopian existence, until such time as they should inevitably flee a changing climate at the end of the ice age and perhaps leaving the earth completely for more suitable colonies among the stars.
Thus, it can be made to appear plausible, with the proper combination of pseudoscience, speculative biology, tried-and-true sci-fi tropes, and a fancifully loose misinterpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing, that a race of marsupial humanoid Dwarves once walked the now-submerged lands of ice-age Sundaland, alongside modern humans and extinct hominids, in the shadow of the space elevators of a wise and beautiful race of functionally immortal spacemen who are now only remembered as elves.
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