[Child of the 7th Age]

Bethberry -

What fascinating stuff! I love how you've tied in Tolkien's process of creation with the actual history of the woodlands and managed hillsides. And I think you are right.

I am reminded of one other piece of historical evidence that supports what you are saying, if only indirectly. At one time historians saw the enclosure movement as reaching a peak in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. More recent studies have pushed those dates back considerably, at least for certain parts of England. In the north, for example, where the enclosure movement was fueled by individual agreements between manorial lords and tenents (rather than the later Acts of Parliament) historians feel that the process was well under way by 1500. When it started is anyone's guess, but surely several hundred years before, as things like this take time.

If you stop and think about it, enclosure makes no sense unless you're talking about a countryside that has been largely stripped of trees. You need great expanses of fens, moors, commons and heath (to say nothing of arable fields and pasturelands) in order for enclosure to work--anything but dense forest. We generally think of the north as one of the "less tame" parts of GB, at least when compared with the southeast. Yet it's quite clear enclosure was proceeding apace in that part of the county during the medieval period: vast tracts of woodlands simply didn't exist.

It's interesting. When I lived/studied in Britain for a considerable chunk of time in the late 60s and early 70s, the Forestry Commission was throwing up connifers on every remote hillside, ostensibly to reforest and recapture the "old" landscape. The truth was that such areas were truly ugly. Miles and miles of a single type of tree hold absolutely no charm. There was nothing natural about it: it looked totally fake! I don't know if they still do this, but hopefully they don't.
I far preferred the "well tended gardens", country footpaths, and enclosed fields reminiscent of The Shire.

In the context of the Shire, it almost seems as if Tolkien could laud the individual tree like the party tree or the mallorn, yet still understand why the Bucklanders felt compelled to keep the wilder forest at bay. A forest like Fangorn or Greenwood or Lorien was a wonderful and mysterious thing....but it was still something to be kept on the other side of a well ordered hedge.

So I guess that's one more thing that's missing in the Shire: a truly wild wood. Of course there's Tuckborough and the Greenhill Country extending east to Woody End. But I never had the impression that this was anything more than a pleasant country woodland. It measures about 40 miles long but was no more than 10-12 miles wide. The Elves traipsed through it on their way west, so it was a special place in the Shire, but definitely not the wild wood that stood outside Buckland and in places like Greenwood.