[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by The Squatter of Amon Rûdh

I expect I've misread your meaning.

You have indeed, but when did that ever stop you? It's my own imprecise form of argument, as MatthewM also misunderstood my comments as a personal comment on his attitude towards history. So let me try again...

There is ignorance wherever humans gather; its seems part of the species. Yet I was not thinking of ignorance so much as a social perspective. It is always difficult to talk generally of a culture, as individual differences are also a part of the species. Yet it is possible to argue that America was founded upon a rejection of history-- of European history--a rejection of its religious intolerance, a rejection of its social hierarchy, a rejection of its appalling history of inequality and lack of individual liberty (while conveniently accepting slavery). It is this general sense of creating newly which I think subtly informs American attitudes towards history, an encouragement not to be weighed down by the past or by tradition. Why, I remember a television interview with a coal miner years ago when Baroness Thatcher was attempting her new world order; he was on strike, he said, to defend tha pits so his son could go down to the mines, like him and his father and his father before him. The poor soul could not imagine a future for his son if there wasn't a mine to go down. (And what do I know? Maybe there in fact was not anything else for the son to do.) Until very recently, I would think that attitude would have been rare in North America, where there was the general expectation that each generation would "do better" than the parents in terms of wealth, position, etc (whether that happened or not is another matter). Perhaps a way to express is to say 'we are free to make our own history rather than forge a place in history'. This is a mythology of course, like any other. It was this very manifest destiny which allowed some of the most flagrant cruelties in North American history...

Originally Posted by Squatter

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.

Hobbits don't have grammar schools, don't have public libraries, don't have newspapers or broadsheets, although interestingly they do have a postal service. Their history lies in the oral tradition-- or at least this how Bilbo and Frodo come to learn of things elven--and it belongs apparently to the 'upper classes' of Hobbit society. The elves themselves, at least those in Rivendell, seem to use that oral tradition in public events or feast meals. Come to think of it, doesn't Bilbo's and Frodo's attitude towards things elven sound a bit similar to that rhetorical device Squatter mentioned about English attitudes toward European sophistication?

And this is also flagrantly meandering away from MatthewM's original idea. I suspect I misread his meaning.