LotR1-FotR-Seq02

[The Saucepan Man]

Originally Posted by Mister Underhill

Hunh. I don't understand you on this one, Sauce. Pesky relatives, good friends, eating, drinking, smoking, dancing, a little bit of honest work -- I think Jackson does a fine job of establishing the Shire as an idyllic and relatively easily identifiable place.

Idyllic, yes. Identifiable to most audiences? I would say not. Indeed, I would say "aspirational", rather than "identifiable". As you say, it may appeal to people's "quiet country life" fantasy, but it is not a place which I think that modern audiences will find easy to identify with as a "grounding" point, even those living in rural areas.

You see, I believe that Tolkien intended his readers to identify with his Hobbit characters most closely out of all his characters, and so he portrayed their land and culture in a way which would be recognisable to readers at the time that he was writing. But times have moved on and I would have thought that only a tiny minority of people today would recognise this idyllic Shire as being anything like their own home environment. I was therefore wondering whether audiences are able to identify as much with the Hobbit characters in the film in the same way as Tolkien intended in the book, or indeed whether Jackson intended them to. His human characters are much less idealised than Tolkien's in most case, so perhaps they (Aragorn, Faramir, Eowyn etc) were intended by Jackson to provide the reference point for his viewers.

Originally Posted by Mister U

I've never bought into the thesis that English readers have a stronger identification with the Shire than any other readers anyway.

I wasn't suggesting that they necessarily will have. My point is that Tolkien's description of the Shire is based on his experience of rural England in the first half of the 20th century and was intended to be a place familiar to English readers of that period (his anticipated readership). While such rural areas at that time were by no means as idyllic as the Shire, my sense is that the Shire, as depicted in both book and film, is much more akin to them than it is to rural areas of today, wherever located.