What ain't there and ought to be.

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by LMP

Yes, that was my initial thought from the get-go. I admit to using the the "butcher" topic as an almost good enough excuse to resurrect this thread.

That could be called 'sneaking'...

Originally Posted by LMP

But it's intriguing questions like this that make bringing the thread back up worth having done. I'm not surprised at the revulsion. Nevertheless, any avid reader of Tolkien would have to admit that slaughtering of farm animals had to have occurred in the Middle-earth Shire, even if it was farmers who did it. Hobbits ate stew, did they not? with meat in it? But did Tolkien mean the Shire to be "perfect"? Perhaps it would be best to say that Tolkien intended it to be idyllic (I can't even bring myself to describe it as bucolic, as that has negative connotations for me!). What ever word you choose to use, the sense of intrusion would probably still be there, I take it? Maybe that has as much to do with us urban shoppers as it does with the act of slaughtering animals? After all, we're more disconnected from the earth than people were in Tolkien's time. The Machine!

Well, to bring in the topic of A.N.Other thread which is popular right now, the idea of something as bloody as butchery would surely break the enchantment which The Shire holds for us? This is not to say that the concept of The Shire is not strong enough to include such basic human needs as meat (if that's not tempting a veggie to argue then I don't know what is, but I don't mean it that way), but I do think that seeing as The Shire also does not have other factors of rural life such as poverty, bad smells and negative insularity, then the absence of butchers is not surprising. Perhaps Tolkien knew well enough that The Shire was meant to be different, and so did not wish to include those things which might break the spell of its charm.

A perfect contrast of how writers see or have seen rural life can be found in literature, and that is the contrast between Tolkien's The Shire, and Thomas Hardy's Wessex (The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure in particular portray a harsh reality).

Even when Tolkien was writing LotR people had become disconnected from their relationship with the earth. It was during WWII that widespread mechanisation of agriculture took hold, simply because it had to in order to get everyone fed, and it did not go away after the end of the war, it only intensified.

I often think that Saruman's rule over The Shire was emblematic of that change. Rather than drawing from the general industrialisation of England, which was already very much in force a century before Tolkien's birth, he may have been drawing specifically on the changes which overcame rural England, for example changes from small farms to agribusiness.

But I have to ask, why does bucolic have negative conotations?