Pritchard (2020) has shown how the staturization of urban spaces makes them inaccessible to people of short stature and encourages their social exclusion. I use the cultural model of disability to explore how Tolkien’s Hobbits and Dwarves can subvert real-world ableist attitudes towards the built environment. While fantasy dwarves have often contributed to ableist metanarratives about people with dwarfism (Reay, 2022), Secondary Worlds can also be used to critique the status quo. As Tolkien stated in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (1947), fantasy worlds are an opportunity for recovery and resistance, allowing us to question the supposedly natural power imbalances in our world. The Hobbits of the Shire and the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm and Erebor have an opportunity that real-world people of short stature rarely get: to create an environment that is suitable to them. An examination of these environments is an opportunity to re-examine our world’s assumptions and expectations around urban accessibility.
