What ain't there and ought to be.

[littlemanpoet]

It just seems to me that we shouldn't assume that because someone's poor they're unhappy. Maybe people these days who are poor (at least in First World countries) consider themselves to be entitled to more. This was not so when Tolkien was a child. Poverty was not necessarily a direct road to unhappiness. Maybe poverty was something that Ronald, Hilary and his mother were unhappy about, and so with many others. But the correlation isn't one to one. Not in Oxfordshire, not in The Shire.

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by lmp

It just seems to me that we shouldn't assume that because someone's poor they're unhappy. Maybe people these days who are poor (at least in First World countries) consider themselves to be entitled to more. This was not so when Tolkien was a child. Poverty was not necessarily a direct road to unhappiness.

It's right that we shouldn't assume poverty equals unhappiness; I spent many years living hand to mouth, and I had endless time to indulge in reading, writing, walking, anything pleasurable, yet when the bills came in I couldn't count myself as anything approaching happy. Poverty can be bearable if we live in a society that is willing to help us without judging us (not calling us scroungers or making us jump through hoops to get anything), and if we have the imagination and creativity to cope, but in the developed world there is a deep shame attached to poverty; we see poor people and assume many things about them, as though their poverty could somehow 'infect' us. And it has always been the case that poverty is likely to lead to unhappiness. Thinking of my grandparents, just a little younger than Tolkien, they would not have said they were happy being poor. They might have expressed a certain inverse pride at just how far they coped with their poverty, but they would have been constantly on the brink of disaster without the safety net that those of us with more money have.

The Shire is idealised, and we cannot imagine anyone going without. I sometimes wonder what destitution lies behind the doors of those smials, but this is me reading into the story the things I know. Tolkien did not approve of certain political systems, and even posited that he might be something of an anarchist; this latter theory is not all about 'bucking the system', it is also about societies which work together co-operatively and peacefully and in so doing, manage without governments. I think that this is what exists in The Shire, a society where burdens are shared and little interference is needed.

[Bêthberry]

This has proven to be one of the most interesting threads here on the Downs, both in terms of littlemanpoet's original conceptualising of his question and in terms of everyone's responses here. I cannot remember a thread (other than that C-thread) which has drawn out the personal responses and points of view of so many of us. Fascinating all round!

Rather than respond to individual posts and comments, I would like to try to frame some ideas about The Shire. I greatly appreciate Child's very perceptive thoughts about the relation betwen the idealism of the The Shire and Tolkien's own emotional or psychological needs. Childhood trauma has often provided children with a key to enter the portal of fantasy and reading, so why shouldn't Tolkien's own losses be crucial in shaping his imagination? I think Child has done an admirable job in examining this "Biography is destiny" approach without turning it into a dogmatic requirement.

So, I don't doubt at all that Tolkien might have been inspired by his own children's imagination to tap into something in his own background. Yet I don't think that only one answer or one way is all there is to the creative life of a major author. Something lurks in The Shire and for me it is also the shaping hand of narrative structure, of remembered stories as well as biography, stirring in that great cauldron of story.

I think it was littlemanpoet who suggested that Tolkien's audience for The Hobbit had grown up, and he could never again go back to that original impetus or motivation. This is to me a fascinating idea, for it suggests part of the dynamic nature of inspiration, of author and audience.

But first off, I don't find The Hobbit to be so thoroughly and totally a children's story. Nor do I find LotR to be so solely a more mature work. But that perhaps is because I don't automatically dismiss children's literature as immature or simplistic. For me, some of the most profound truths of the human psyche are met and shaped by story, whatever age we are. We enter story to face or come to terms with experiences life either throws us or does not throw us--both extremes.

This is all my way of trying tosay things about the idealism of The Shire, of trying to find some 'reason' for it and its nature. I want to think of some literary impulses, perhaps like those which Fordim posits so often. The structure off the tale as tale or story.

One of the things which has always inttrigued me is where Tolkien puts his wildwood, his place of dark, elemental fear and darkness, of disoriented perception where both reader and character are thrown back into some kind of elemental , primal experience. This is the stuff of fantasy, of faerie, as critics and psychoanalysts and readers have remarked time and time again.

Tolkien does not begin with the woodland or wildwood. His Old Forest and then Fangorn Forest come later in his tale. They are there, and contain first a story of terror where the hobbits are nearly swallowed up by the trees, in the guise of Old Man Willow. This is the primal condition of learning how to read the signs and save oneself in completely foreign territory, where everything is unknown and the terrible reigns. Yet by the time Merry and Pippin reach Fangorn, they have learned to negotiate the wildwood. However dark and deep and mysterious is Fangorn, something different happens here: theiy quickly learn Treebeard is to be trusted. In terms of faerie, this journey is one of increasing self-command and self-knowledge over the terrain of the unconcious. But Tolkien does not begin here.

Yet Tolkien also wrote that he wanted at least initially to create a mythology for the English--note not an English mythology, but one for those people. Where is the wildwood in that culture? It in fact, predates legend.

Important forest tales for England are imported from Germany and France, if recent studies can be relied on, such as that of Francis Spufford. Hansel and Gretel and LIttle Red Riding Hood come from the woodland cultures of Europe and the tales of Robin Hood date to the Norman invasion. Yet biologists and other scientists have recently shown that even Roman Britain and Saxon England were dewooded landscapes. Apparently by 500 BC half the woodland was gone. Spufford argues that this puts "the death of the British woodland before recorded memory." In other words, there aren't even stories to be "garbled" as they are handed down by legend.

This scientific evidence off course post dates Tolkien's death, but the fact of the absence of wildwood in the old legends does not. What was there in the old Anglo Saxon legends for him to tap into? Old English literature is a literature of the managed hillside, the pruned coppice; most of the land is already farmed, in one way or another. (Apparently by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, no wood was larger than four miles in any distance.)

Tolkien, then, began where the legends of ancient Britain allowed him to begin: with a countryside already brought under human agriculture and the wildwood brought down under the axe. Perhaps the hobbits lived in holes because they had learnt not to chop down trees and build homes with timber, but nonetheless they still lived in the kind of "garden" where the entwives would be happy, those creatures devoted to 'possessive love.'

It would appear there are both biographical and literary reasons for The shire to be so domesticated, so cosy, so idyllic.

[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.

[Lalwendë]

Bethberry and Child have prompted me into some 'mad' thinking again.

The wildwood of the UK had already started to disappear when people began farming, so the existence of an extensive wildwood is indeed well beyond the annals of history. Yet even now, 2% of the UK is said to be covered by 'wildwood', so it definitely exists, even if it is not as extensive, although it will rarely be a place of peace as it will be beset with pleasure seekers, as are the remnants of Sherwood today, sadly. But tales of the wildwood do exist, and this suggests that such tales must have been carried down through the ages.

When Tolkien claimed he wanted to create a mythology for the English he set out his stall very clearly, yet I always hope that when he made that impressive statement of intent that he meant a particular type of mythology, i.e. a written one. This is something which is lacking in comparison to some other cultures, but I hope that he did only mean this, as the English never have lacked a mythology. There is a wealth of myth and legend in England, much of it never written down, and which as a result has shifted over time through invasion, impositions of language (e.g. with the Normans, Latin was imposed for 'formal' use), religious oppression and change, and finally, early urbanisation in comparison to most other countries.

What myths already exist? There are the Robin Hood tales, which may not have been formalised until the medieval period, but we can say the same of tales about Arthur, and we accept that such tales must have existed orally before they were formalised. Robin Hood may have developed from a number of figures, who go by a variety of names including The Green Man, Cernunnos, The Horned God, John Barleycorn etc. Unfortunately, written tales simply did not exist, and so instead of a 'mythology', we have instead a 'folklore', the preserve of the ordinary people. One good source of older information might be found in folk song, which is particularly rich in images and was mostly untainted by the kind of religious or social impositions that might have restricted the kind of ideas presented in books or manuscripts.

The sense of the wildwood has never fully left English culture, even though it does not exist, and we can see this in how tales of Robin Hood, descended from those of the Old Gods, have remained popular to this day. Possibly, even the English obsession with gardening stems from a sense of something 'lost', that we all seek a little piece of wildwood of our own? On a small island, without much room for an extensive Wildwood, there are still some pockets existing today, and they are attractive to visitors, as anyone who has been in Sherwood on a Sunday will agree - though there is a deep irony in seeing queues of cars creeping along just to disgorge people who wish to visit the Major Oak and eat an ice cream as they gawp.

Yes, the English countryside had very definitely been 'tamed' thousands of years ago, but the stories remain to this day. And I do like to think that Tolkien knew this, and that he did mean he was creating, specifically, a written mythology. The evidence that he made use of 'the Old Gods' in his work is so strong that I cannot help thinking he was keenly aware that their stories had never been written down, that he wanted to include their stories in his work.

[littlemanpoet]

The thing that's tickling my brain now, based on the previous three posts, is that the Shire with its Hobbits, mediates Middle Earth to us. How could it (and they), unless it (and they) feel like where we are (like people we know of - if not ourselves)?

It's interesting (to me at least) that when I first read the account of Bilbo and the Dwarves passing through open, wild country between Hobbiton and Rivendell, my mind made an immediate connection between these wild forests, and those of continental Europe - Germany? The Black Forest?

So yes, I am intrigued by the "ain't there"-ness of wild woods, too. Bit of a ramble here.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

It strikes me that perhaps in the descriptions of a wild and untamed forest we don't have a reflection of a much more modern European history: that of imperialism and colonial control. A recurring theme or motif in colonialist and imperialist literature is that of the "civilised" European entering into a landscape that in its sheer scale dwarfs the human. The "primitive" or "untamed" nature of such landscapes is a common idea in these accounts -- accounts which, of course, miss entirely the fact that these lands were not "untamed" or "wild" but very much in use by the inhabitants, just in ways and through methods that were different from the European models.

When the hobbits go into the Old Forest or Fangorn and see this foreign, frightening, and apparently uninhabited place, there is an unmistakable resemblance to the accounts of European travellers arriving in my own country way back in the day. The forests were thought to be 'unused' when, on the contrary, the native peoples had vast trading networks, large agricultural works and extensive hunting practices. They had not enclosed the land and subjected it to crop rotation, and so the Europeans saw it as "wild" -- by which they meant simply that it was different.

It's this same fear of difference or of otherness that really afflicts the denizens of the Shire. The Old Forest and Fangorn are inhabited, but they are inhabited by beings so different and "strange" from the hobbits that they are frightened by their "wildness".

I am not suggesting that Tolkien meant by these episodes to reflect in any conscious way on the nature of history of European colonial encounters, but there is an interesting analog possible. . .