[Bêthberry]

This has proven to be one of the most interesting threads here on the Downs, both in terms of littlemanpoet's original conceptualising of his question and in terms of everyone's responses here. I cannot remember a thread (other than that C-thread) which has drawn out the personal responses and points of view of so many of us. Fascinating all round!

Rather than respond to individual posts and comments, I would like to try to frame some ideas about The Shire. I greatly appreciate Child's very perceptive thoughts about the relation betwen the idealism of the The Shire and Tolkien's own emotional or psychological needs. Childhood trauma has often provided children with a key to enter the portal of fantasy and reading, so why shouldn't Tolkien's own losses be crucial in shaping his imagination? I think Child has done an admirable job in examining this "Biography is destiny" approach without turning it into a dogmatic requirement.

So, I don't doubt at all that Tolkien might have been inspired by his own children's imagination to tap into something in his own background. Yet I don't think that only one answer or one way is all there is to the creative life of a major author. Something lurks in The Shire and for me it is also the shaping hand of narrative structure, of remembered stories as well as biography, stirring in that great cauldron of story.

I think it was littlemanpoet who suggested that Tolkien's audience for The Hobbit had grown up, and he could never again go back to that original impetus or motivation. This is to me a fascinating idea, for it suggests part of the dynamic nature of inspiration, of author and audience.

But first off, I don't find The Hobbit to be so thoroughly and totally a children's story. Nor do I find LotR to be so solely a more mature work. But that perhaps is because I don't automatically dismiss children's literature as immature or simplistic. For me, some of the most profound truths of the human psyche are met and shaped by story, whatever age we are. We enter story to face or come to terms with experiences life either throws us or does not throw us--both extremes.

This is all my way of trying tosay things about the idealism of The Shire, of trying to find some 'reason' for it and its nature. I want to think of some literary impulses, perhaps like those which Fordim posits so often. The structure off the tale as tale or story.

One of the things which has always inttrigued me is where Tolkien puts his wildwood, his place of dark, elemental fear and darkness, of disoriented perception where both reader and character are thrown back into some kind of elemental , primal experience. This is the stuff of fantasy, of faerie, as critics and psychoanalysts and readers have remarked time and time again.

Tolkien does not begin with the woodland or wildwood. His Old Forest and then Fangorn Forest come later in his tale. They are there, and contain first a story of terror where the hobbits are nearly swallowed up by the trees, in the guise of Old Man Willow. This is the primal condition of learning how to read the signs and save oneself in completely foreign territory, where everything is unknown and the terrible reigns. Yet by the time Merry and Pippin reach Fangorn, they have learned to negotiate the wildwood. However dark and deep and mysterious is Fangorn, something different happens here: theiy quickly learn Treebeard is to be trusted. In terms of faerie, this journey is one of increasing self-command and self-knowledge over the terrain of the unconcious. But Tolkien does not begin here.

Yet Tolkien also wrote that he wanted at least initially to create a mythology for the English--note not an English mythology, but one for those people. Where is the wildwood in that culture? It in fact, predates legend.

Important forest tales for England are imported from Germany and France, if recent studies can be relied on, such as that of Francis Spufford. Hansel and Gretel and LIttle Red Riding Hood come from the woodland cultures of Europe and the tales of Robin Hood date to the Norman invasion. Yet biologists and other scientists have recently shown that even Roman Britain and Saxon England were dewooded landscapes. Apparently by 500 BC half the woodland was gone. Spufford argues that this puts "the death of the British woodland before recorded memory." In other words, there aren't even stories to be "garbled" as they are handed down by legend.

This scientific evidence off course post dates Tolkien's death, but the fact of the absence of wildwood in the old legends does not. What was there in the old Anglo Saxon legends for him to tap into? Old English literature is a literature of the managed hillside, the pruned coppice; most of the land is already farmed, in one way or another. (Apparently by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, no wood was larger than four miles in any distance.)

Tolkien, then, began where the legends of ancient Britain allowed him to begin: with a countryside already brought under human agriculture and the wildwood brought down under the axe. Perhaps the hobbits lived in holes because they had learnt not to chop down trees and build homes with timber, but nonetheless they still lived in the kind of "garden" where the entwives would be happy, those creatures devoted to 'possessive love.'

It would appear there are both biographical and literary reasons for The shire to be so domesticated, so cosy, so idyllic.