[davem]

Estelyn & Fordim

davem, the ‘homey’ feel of the Shire is evident to me, though I grew up in Midwest USA. I’m sure the familiar names and idiosyncrasies would feel even closer to English readers, but I wonder if it doesn’t strike a chord with most humans. Perhaps it’s an archetype of ‘Home’ for us all?

I suspect it was 'home' for Tolkien, & I suppose his memories of his childhood at Sarehole were at the basis of it. The interesting thing for me is, the 'Shire' of the Hobbit is also a reflection of the world of his childhood in a way - a time when there was 'less noise & more green', but that world was never under threat in the story. Bilbo came back to a Shire as beautiful, safe & permanent as the one he left. But in LotR we begin with the Shire under threat. This time there will be no going away for an adventure, with a safe, secure home waiting in the 'kindly West' for the adventurers to wish themselves back in. I can't help wondering if the attitude reflected in The Hobbit comes out of Tolkien's belief when he went off to fight in WW1, that England was waiting, & would always be as he remembered it - if he survived his own adventure, whereas LotR reflects his more mature thinking, as he lived through WW2 - 'Home' (Heimat) will always be under threat now, it will always need someone to make the sacrifice, give things up so that others may keep them.

What I sense, for all that he presents the Hobbits as almost incurably parochial (& light-fingered - no wonder Gandalf chose a Hobbit when he needed a professional burglar! Some of them would take anything that wasn't nailed down!), I think they symbolise what he loved - 'the land of lost content', the England he grew up in & fought (& would have died) for. Perhaps its the depth of this love that he manages to communicate to us in the Prologue & first chapter, & its that love that comes through, & that his readers respond to, even if the actual place he describes is not similar to any place they've known. We certainly pick up on the sense of what we love being threatened, & want it to be saved. Its the ordinariness of the Shire & its inhabitants that makes me want Frodo to succeed - if Tolkien had set his stories in some typically outlandish fantasy world, would we care as deeply (or at all) whether it was saved or not?

Still, I rather suspect that American and (to a lesser extent) Canadian (such as myself) readers would not respond quite so instantly and familiarly to the subtle differences of class in the Shire.

I may be too typical of my culture, but I have to admit that when I first read LotR, the 'class thing' didn't register on me. I simply accepted the relationship - though I'm definitely in the same class as Sam, I didn't feel in any way that he was 'inferior' to the others. It was only when I started reading books on Tolkien (& latterly accessing posts on web sites) by Americans that I even started to think about the 'class thing'! Maybe I've been kept in my place too long!
(DENNIS:
'Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
ARTHUR:
Bloody peasant!
DENNIS:
Oh, what a give-away. Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about. Did you see him repressing me? You saw it, didn't you?....

('I mean, if I went 'round saying I was King of Gondor just because some Half-Elf had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!'))