It's 1984 in the Third Age

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Wayland

Hi Lalwendë,
What a good thread. A similar thought came to my mind as I read the Lotr.

The humble Hobbits, I mused, may be non other than the good-hearted yeomanry of the English Shires, forced by brute economics from their land and into the dark mills and squalid housing of the Industrial Revolution.

Our little fellowship, in their journey, took a road back through time and encountered the twin streams of their powerful ancestry - the vital, warrior-like Riders of Rohan (Anglo-Saxons) and the mighty heirs of Numenor (Classical Civilisation and the knowledge it brought from across the sea).

They grew as individuals and returned to liberate the Shire from the nightmare which had enveloped it.

Perhaps what Tolkein would have liked to have seen?

Then again, I may be reading too much into it.

That's a really good way of looking at it. I suppose in this thread we are drawing comparisons with the 'political' machine - but the best of all comparisons with regard to what happened in The Shire is simply the impact of the Industrial Revolution. In the name of profit machinery came and not only bespoiled the landscape but took people away from the land, from their localities (and hence from their histories and culture) and made them mere servants to these machines. That was also the change that Morris and his contemporaries disliked - Socialists funnily enough!

And I do like the idea that the Hobbits travelled back into the heart of their ancestry as this is the sense that I get from LotR, that I'm somehow 'seeing' the past. I remember reading the book for the first time and having a vague sense that the Rohirrim were a bit like the Saxons and Norse, the Elves like the Celts, and so on. Of course reading LotR stirred up a lot of change in my outlook - including a never ending thirst for our history, a need to work out the mysteries of our past, and a wish to prevent Sarumans from spoiling what was left. I wonder if Tolkien intended his work to be seen like that - as a journey 'back'? It might make sense of his whole idea of 'creating a mythology he could dedicate to England'.