Few people would expect the Marvel Cinematic Universe to share territory with The Lord of the Rings, but here we are.
The two franchises couldn’t be more different, but a throwaway line from 2021’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is inspiring a re-examination of the ties between J.R.R. Tolkien’s iconic world and the superhero franchise. In a stellar confirmation of Bucky’s OG nerd status, he shares, in a discussion with Sam, his longstanding ties to Middle-earth.
The conversation comes about in episode two of the show’s first season and sees Sam insist that a treat on the level of “the big three” could be imminent. These big three are soon explained as “androids, aliens, and wizards,” which Sam sees as the three biggest threats our world has ever faced. It’s reasonable when you consider the Loki, Ultron, and Thanos of it all — the very same baddies that served as primary antagonists for each of the first four Avengers flicks.
It is Bucky’s response to this statement, however, that is really pulling in renewed fan examination, due to Bucky’s admission of a longstanding fandom. After making a quip about fighting Gandalf, Bucky gets a surprised reaction from Sam and promptly reveals that he read Tolkien’s The Hobbit a long, long time ago.
“I read The Hobbit,” Bucky says, in the early season episode. “In 1937, when it first came out.”
That’s some serious nerd cred, all on its own, but one fan’s re-examination of this line only elevates Bucky to higher nerd status. See, The Hobbit did release in 1937, but only a rare few copies were on the market. More importantly, they were on the market in Britain, where Tolkien lived, and thus were extremely hard to get in the states. In order for Bucky to have enjoyed the book in 1937, as he claims, Reddit user Monskimoo revealed that Bucky would have needed to “directly import one of the first 4,500 British copies and read it before December.” Even if he was remembering his years wrong, and actually read the book the next year, “he’d still be one of the first 7,500 people in the world to own a copy of Tolkien’s book.”
These numbers are actually slightly incorrect, but the real numbers only make Bucky’s assertion more impressive. See, the first print run for The Hobbit only produced 1,500 copies, rather than 4,500, and they quickly sold out before the year came to a close. That would mean that, in order for Bucky to enjoy the book in 1937, he would have been one of the first 1,500 people to read it, and he would have had to import the book essentially as soon as it was published.
This tantalizing bit of nerd knowledge instantly caught the attention of both Tolkien fans and Marvel fans, who were delighted at the minor revelation of Bucky’s longstanding Tolkien love. The character doesn’t come across as an obvious fantasy fan, but he put some serious effort into obtaining and enjoying the hard-to-access fantasy favorite.
Even if this bit of dialogue was a mistake on the writers’ part, fans are fully dedicated to establishing Bucky as a hardcore nerd in MCU canon. His longstanding status as a Tolkienite is officially written in stone, and now fans want to know what other fantasy staples he enjoyed long before they became classics. He was already in captivity when 1968’s The Last Unicorn was published, but do you think he got in on those first-edition copies of T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone? We’d like to think so.
