LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 01 - A Long-Expected Party

[Marlowe221]

Originally Posted by davem

Squatter:


This has always struck me - the 'Englishness' of the world of the Shire - to the extent that I was deeply surprised that readers from other countries could relate to the story at all. I can't help asking the (probably unanswerable)question, whether English readers understand/experience the Shire & its inhabitants differently from readers in other countries (as, I'd assume, a Russian would understand/experience, say, War & Peace differently to a non Russian). Or, if you're not English, are there parts of your country that feel like the Shire - Hope this is not too far off topic, but the effect of the opening chapter on myself (& like Squatter I'd include the map of the Shire in with the first chapter) is to place me in a world which I recognise - landscapes, placenames, personal names, etc - so that the sense of 'menace' is more intense & disturbing because its happening 'at home', as it were. If you come from a country/culture which is very diferent from the one described, do you identify with the Shire, or does it feel more 'alien' to you. Or to put it another way, does the Shire feel like the familiar & 'everday' world to everyone, or does it have the same kind of 'otherness' about it as Lorien or Gondor - does anyone start the book with the feeling that they're [I]already[/] in another world?

I realize that this thread is quite old but having found this particular observation fascinating I could not help but respond.

While the Shire is very English in its placenames and geographical features I, as an American, have always been able to identify very strongly with the Shire and its inhabitants simply because I am from a part of the US that shares many features (IMHO) with the Shire.

I am from Mississippi - a VERY rural and agricultural state. We have a remarkably varied landscape here, just like the Shire. We have more than our share of gently rolling hills, woods, fields, and little rivers. A dirt road is not uncommon when one gets outside of town (or "out in the county" as we would say). It is green and beautiful. We even have a region much like the Marish, i.e. the Delta, where it is very flat, sometimes marshy, near a river on our border, largely farm land, and so on.

Much of our culture in Mississippi (and the rural Southeastern US in general) has a tendency to be parochial and insular. Conversations run as much, if not more, to the doings of the neighbors and other acquaintances as they do to events on the national scale. Of course there are exceptions - there are large cities like Atlanta and great centers of learning and education like the famous universities in North Carolina. But Mississippi is hundreds of miles away from those places and is still very rural. In fact one might say, with some truth, that a love of learning is far from general here - a very frustrating fact.

Meanwhile genealogy is very important here and conversations between strangers inevitably run to which county one is from, whom one knows, and to whom one is related. I have heard and listened to conversations that sound very much like things the various Hobbits say through the first few chapters in the Shire (i.e. syntax, diction, turns of phrase, etc.) all my life, though of course with Southern accents rather than English ones.

Of course the parallels are not exact and it is easy for me to see many differences as well. Americans who live in other parts of the country may not be able to relate so well but I have always imagined that Americans living in the Southeast and New England (as another example) probably don't have too tough a time finding a vicarious home in the Shire.