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I am committing a heinous crime here in my own eyes at least, jumping in here with a post without having thoroughly read all previous posts in the thread. I'm sorry, I will read all later, but I'm very busy at the moment...many of the posts are just terrific, and I want to give them my best attention.
But I wanted to make a couple of points before this thread slipped back down to the second page.
I am not English but I have lived here for most of my life and I love this country. But what is it exactly, I wonder, that I love, and is it also what Tolkien loved? Previous posters who talked about the lack of concrete cultural identity in England are right. In fact, you might almost define English identity by its contradictions and confusions.
Given this, I don't actually agree that Anglo-Saxon England was 'real' England and that subsequent Englands were not. I don't think it is possible to pause the videotape of history at a certain point and say, yes, this is genuine, this is ideal, all that came before and after is not.
And as far as the 'Englishness' of the Shire is concerned, I agree that it is a kind of ideal, a rural idyll - but Tolkien was sharp enough to be very aware of his ideal's limitations. Frodo is often frustrated by the parochial, narrow-minded attitudes he encounters among his fellow hobbits. Perhaps this is true of rural communities everywhere, not just in England.
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