Utopian Shire

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Laurinquë

Perhaps I'm just being an Alaskan, but I fail to see what is so great about a peaceful agrarian society. I would much rather live in a peaceful society that hasn't ripped the land to shreds, aka "tamed" it. For this reason I much prefer places like Lothlorien or Rivendell, where there is peaceful civilization, but also where the land has been left fairly undisturbed.

I do not think we should see a bygone era of pre-industrialization farming as a wonderful golden age of humanity, a time before the land was laid to waste or whatever, if the land has been farmed it has already been laid to waste, it's as simple as that.

Tolkien seems to have considered pre-industrialization England as the true England, when really he should have been looking back to a time before humans had ever laid eyes on the place.

For these reason, I cannot say that I would consider the Shire to be a utopia, or at least not one I would care to live in.

The English landscape has been that way for millennia by the hands of man and their farming activities. Tolkien liked to see green fields and hedgerows as much as he liked to see woodland, and before men began to farm, most of England was just wildwood. There is a delicate balance between farming and nature in this country and if farmers change their methods or just stop farming then we'd actually lose a lot of the beautiful landscapes as we know them.

If you take the Lakeland fells as just one example - hill farmers using traditional methods of turning sheep out on the same fields each year helps to keep the hillsides free of gorse and a place where wildflowers and wildlife can flourish. If farmers stop doing this - and many are, as it's about as hard a life as you could imagine, being a hill farmer - then the landscape would actually be quite ugly. Farmers in the UK are subsidised to maintain old practices in an attempt to stop some landscapes being despoiled as 'natural' isn't always that nice.

Tolkien enjoyed seeing the pretty, well tended fields of agricultural areas as much as he liked the woods and the wilder places - maybe even more if you look at how scary his woodlands are!