Quote:
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Originally Posted by davem
Their race story is a tragedy. They appear out of nowhere, settle & make a peaceful home for themselves, save the world, & disappear again ... When Aragorn bans Men from entering the Shire he is acknowledging a harsh fact about his own race. It is Men who will destroy the hobbits in the end, not anything the hobbits could do to themselves (yet it is also men who will ensure their survival for as long as possible) ... We can condemn Aragorn (& Tolkien) for the solution he comes up with, but what other alternative does he have?
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But the tragedy of the Hobbits, and Aragorn's limited choice, arises solely from the fact that Tolkien wrote his Middle-earth tales as an account of our own world's long-lost history. Given this approach, what choice did he have but to write Hobbits out of the story (or at least into the hidden, secluded spots of the world), given that we do not see any Hobbits around us today?
Had he written Middle-earth as a truly fictional world, he could have had the Hobbits integrate with the world of men through greater interaction and understanding, in a larger scale version of the community of Bree. Which I think is what
Child was getting at with her unease at Aragorn's (and before that the Dunedain's) policy. In an
ideal world, it
ought to be possible for Hobbits and Men to integrate. And it is possible in reality for peoples of different cultures and traditions to integrate (although there are, sadly, far too many examples of where they have been unable to do so
).