"Gated communities"......

[Child of the 7th Age]

On a recent thread that dealt with academics and their perceptions of Middle-earth, Bethberry raised the intriguing term "gated community" when discussing Tom Bombadil and Goldberry.

To be truthful, this same phrase has often crossed my mind when reading Lord of the Rings. So many of the communities in Middle-earth can be seen as self-contained enclaves that discouraged others from staying or even visiting. There's Lorien, perhaps the most extreme example of all, where most folk are discouraged from entering. There's Rivendell which does let a few visitors in, but has secret entrances and exits. The inhabitants of the Shire clearly look inward and pay little attention to those outside their borders. The fourth age prohibition on men entering the Shire is, in my opinion, an extreme example of this. And then there's the dwarves. It's true that they often acted as traders, but they also have a secret language, which no one else knew. Their private lives are so hidden that Tolkien only gave us a name for one representative female dwarf. Folk even speculate about what dwarf women might have looked like because no one truly knows.

You can certainly go back in Tolkien's history and find other examples of communities that are gated and protected in some sense. There's Valinor itself as well as the Elvish cities in Beleriand. There's the isle of Numenor, which is protected by the ocean waves.

Remember, we are talking about the "good guys" here, not the villains. Yet, my feelings are always a little mixed when I consider how many of the communities in Middle-earth look like gated enclaves. The idea of a gated, protected community in real life makes me recoil. I'm older than most posters here, and I remember fighting against such structures way back when, since they invariably implied racial separation of some sort.

This is obviously not what Tolkien meant. But what was he saying by giving us the gated community as an ideal? Or perhaps others would argue with the statement I've just put forward.

Was this for merely practical reasons, the need for physical protection and isolation in a dangerous world? Certainly, one can make that argument for Beleriand and Valinor and a host of other locations prior to the destruction of the Ring.

And yet I still have the feeling that something else is going on here. Did Tolkien feel that "gated communities" were necessary for the different peoples of Middle-earth to maintain their cultural identity? Could this have possibly had anything to do with his own perceptions of England's past, where its separation from the mainland served to protect it, at least until recently? How did JRRT reconcile his concept of the "gated community" with his other obvious belief, expressed in LotR, that the different peoples of Middle-earth had to learn to cooperate or they would perish? And why, after the defeat of the Ring, did the hobbits and Woses again put up bars to keep others out?

Are there exceptions to this gated model? One example that springs to mind is the interchange between the Elves of Mirkwood, the men of Dale and their dwarf neighbors.

But, still, there are enough hints in the books and Letters to suggest that Tolkien would have respected the adage "Good fences make good neighbors." What is Tolkien telling us about the nature of the Free Peoples and, by implication, our own natures? It's always disturbed and intrigued me. Anyone have some answers?

Cami Goodchild who hails from "The Shire," a gated community in the southerly part of our site.....

[ April 01, 2003: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]