[davem]

Originally Posted by LmP

I think Tolkien provides a clue by saying that LotR is about death. It's a story about endings. Great things are drawing to a conclusion and merely mundane things are taking their place; the First Age of gods and Elves (and some noble Men) and Morgoth the Great is followed by the Second Age of Numenorean Half Men/Half Elves, a shrunken Middle Earth (Beleriand is lost), and Sauron. Which is followed by the Third Age with its waning of the Elves, and then the Fourth Age in which Elves and hobbits diminish and the mundane world of Men takes over. Myth gives way to legend, gives way to folklore, gives way to history, gives way to yesterday's news.

This is possibly taking things a bit off topic, but in a thread I started a while ago - 'The Nazis & a Mythology for England http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showthread.php?t=11047
- I posted this quote from an essay in Tolkien the Medievalist by Christine Chism: Middle earth, the Middle Ages, & the Aryan Nation: Myth & History in WWII.

The Lord of the Rings is a tale of the renunciation of mythology & the willed return to history. The Ring - that wierdly empty, wierdly powerful object around which the narrative assembles itself - interrogates the imaginative capacity for world creation itself. Middle earth unfolds, grows more intricate, more peopled, more culturally diverse, more deep as we wander through it, but it blooms forth only in the shadow of its own imminent destruction. The loss of the Ring consignes Middle earth to the joys & depridations of history - & this consignment to history is costly. It is no accident that the loss of the Ring maims Frodo forever & disenchants Middle earth - it is also, possibly, no accident that the Lord of the Rings is the last long narrative that the author completed. And, finally, I argue, it is no accident that the writing of this renunciatory narrative occuoies dark night after dark night, during a time when Germany was mobilising & recasting heroic "'Germanic' ideals" to articulate & impose its own terrifying new world.

(She goes on to note)
However, I think that Tolkien's construction of Englishness in his characterisation of the Shire is to be distinguished from Hitler's Nordic nationalism, chiefly by its self-positioning as always already tiny, precarious & half lost. It emerges in the shadow of a destruction so inexorable that nothing could recover it - neither a triumphant political, cultural, & military nationalist program (which would destroy it further as Saruman shows) nor a past-sanctifying politics of heritage. The Red Book that Frodo bequeaths to Sam ends in blank pages open to subsequent narration. We are continually reminded that the Shire is a part of Middle earth & that the parochialism of Hobbits is both delusory & idiotic. An open-bordered country, an open-ended history book, & a need to open the minds of parochail inhabitants to the larger world they inhabit - all offer interesting resistances to traditional nationalisms.