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Originally Posted by Bêthberry
I dare say you probably haven't, as you have never been to America to notice the lay of the land. It's all book study to you, and journalism. At least, you once told me in person that you had never travelled to North America.
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That's true, and I should have mentioned it. In my limited experience, though, North Americans show as much if not more interest in their history than people in my own country. Being surrounded by relics of the past doesn't necessarily mean that you know or care very much about them. In a survey about fifteen years ago, several teenagers had Winston Churchill down as one of the Ghostbusters; and one boy (who was interviewed at a Civil War re-enactment) thought that Oliver Cromwell lost to Charles I.
I'm always wary of suggestions that North America is perhaps less appreciative of its past or less culturally aware than people on the other side of the Water. It's common in Britain to claim that the rest of Europe is more sophisticated, more open-minded and generally socially superior to our own backward, reactionary and vulgar culture; but that's been a common rhetorical device at least since the Romans (whose cultural attitude toward Greece is very reminiscent of Britain's toward France). I would hate to think that Canadians and Americans were falling into the same trap with Europe in general over something so minor as having a couple of thousand years' less European history, so I try to argue against anything that looks like that sort of argument. I say 'European history' because there are millennia of inconveniently unrecorded human history in the Americas going back long before Leif Eiriksson first set foot on Newfoundland. I expect I've misread your meaning.
That was flagrantly off the Tolkien trail. In a flailing and desperate attempt to return, I shall clumsily draw Tolkien's portrayal of the Hobbits and their nomenclature over my shameless pontification. Names such as Peregrin, Paladin, Meriadoc, Saradoc and others are specifically referred to by Tolkien as heroic names given not for their forgotten meaning, but because they sounded nice. Similarly their transformation of 'Baranduin' to 'Brandywine' due to ignorance of its meaning is fairly typical of English conventions. The Hobbits are like the average Englishman: living in the midst of thousands of years of history, yet blissfully unaware of its meaning or import; or even, in many cases, of its existence. I would suggest that this applies to more people in the world than the Warwickshire villagers who were Tolkien's models, and I don't think that the attitude respects either national or continental boundaries.