If you could have been born in Middle Earth...

[Alcidas]

^
Daft

Whoever heard of a pipeweed smoking elf?

[Ninde Lossehelin]

A hobbit of the shire.... Good peaceful and food loving

[skip spence]

Perhaps the city of Umbar, some time during the latter parts of Gondorian rule?

I bet that would be an exiting city, a melting pot of different cultures and peoples; a place where goods and services from all around Middle Earth would be readily available for a price; a place where there's a little something for everybody, be they into history, art, partying, war or adventuring; a place where there's nice sunny weather, beaches, good food and drink, good women, and a bit edgy too, certainly not a quiet and safe old folks retreat.

[Mumriken]

Perhaps the city of Umbar, some time during the latter parts of Gondorian rule?

I bet that would be an exiting city, a melting pot of different cultures and peoples; a place where goods and services from all around Middle Earth would be readily available for a price; a place where there's a little something for everybody, be they into history, art, partying, war or adventuring; a place where there's nice sunny weather, beaches, good food and drink, good women, and a bit edgy too, certainly not a quiet and safe old folks retreat.

I'm quite sure Tolkien would have hated multi-cultarism.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Mumriken

I'm quite sure Tolkien would have hated multi-cultarism.

You are probably right. He didn't like cults, and several cults would have been reprehensible to him.

[jallanite]

Despite Mumriken’s opinion, Tolkien’s attitude towards what would today be called multiculturalism seems to me to be supportive.

Read letter 53 in which Tolkien supports multiculturalim as opposed to what he calls “Americo-cosmopolitanism”. Tolkien also writes:

Col. Knox says ⅛ of the world’s population speaks ‘English’, and that is the biggest language group. If true, damn shame – say I.

In his lecture English and Welsh Tolkien summarizes what he calls “this legal oppression of the Welsh language″ which he deplores. Tolkien notes:

Governments – or far-seeing civil servants from Thomas Cromwell onwards – understand the matter of language well enough, for their purposes. Uniformity is naturally neater; it is also very much more manageable. A hundred-per-cent Englishman is easier for an English government to handle. It does not matter what he was, or what his fathers were. Such an Englishman is any man who speaks English natively, and has lost any effective tradition of a different and more independent past. For though cultural and other traditions may accompany a difference of language, they are chiefly maintained and preserved by language. Language is the prime differentiator of peoples –not of races–, whatever that much-misused word may mean in the long-blended history of western Europe.

The full paper is available at http://demo.ort.org.il/clickit2/file.../948358249.pdf .

[crescendo.]

After giving this some thought I would probably be an elf and live in Ithilian. Seeing as the elven colonies were beginning to fall after the destruction of the ring and by the time Galadriel left the leaves of the beautiful Lorien began to fall, I would start in Ithilian to mingle the remaining Elves among men. But if it's before the war, I'd be an elf in Lorien. A handmaiden to Galadriel.