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10 Was the Shire meant to be England? (Tolkien and his work)
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This article is from the Tolkien FAQ, by William D.B. Loos loos@hudce.harvard.edu with numerous contributions by others.
10 Was the Shire meant to be England? (Tolkien and his work)
In this case, the balance between "actually *was*" and "was based
upon" is entirely tipped towards the latter. There is no hint that
the Shire was in any sense supposed the be the country now called
England in an ancient state. On the other hand, there is plainly a
very strong resemblance between the Shire and the rural England of
about a century ago.
More precisely, the Shire plainly could not *be* England in any
literal sense: England is an island, and even changes in "the shape of
all lands" (FR, 11) is insufficient to explain such a discrepancy
(especially since even the westernmost part of the Shire was some 200
miles from the Sea). Nevertheless, the Shire was more exactly based
on England than any other part of Middle-earth was based on any part
of our world: the climate, place-names, flora and fauna, terrain,
food, customs, and the inhabitants themselves, were all English. In
effect the Shire was an idealized version of the rural England of
Tolkien's childhood. Some of his comments on the matter were:
[The Shire] is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about
the period of the Diamond Jubilee ...
Letters, 230 (#178)
But, of course, if we drop the 'fiction' of long ago, 'The Shire' is
based on rural England and not any other country in the world...
[Later in the same letter he implied that the Shire was "an imag-
inary mirror" of England.]
Letters, 250 (#190)
There is no special reference to England in the 'Shire' -- except
of course that as an Englishman brought up in an 'almost rural'
village of Warwickshire on the edge of the prosperous bourgeoisie of
Birmingham (about the time of the Diamond Jubilee!) I take my models
like anyone else -- from such 'life' as I know.
Letters, 235 (#181)
See also RtMe 31-33 for a fascinating suggestion that certain compo-
nents of Tolkien's early philological studies may have contributed to
his later conception of the Shire. Shippey has also suggested that
Tolkien's motivation in changing Gandalf's supper request in ch 1 of
_The Hobbit_ from "cold chicken and tomatoes" in the first edition to
"cold chicken and pickles" in the revised edition was linguistic: that
to Tolkien's extraordinarily sensitive ear "tomato" sounded out of
place in a country that was a mirror of English, since tomato only
entered the language in the sixteenth century and moreover originally
came from some Caribbean language. Likewise, tobacco, used in _The
Hobbit_, was changed to "pipeweed", and "potatos" were usually spoken
of only by Sam, who called them "taters" (RtMe, 53-54; Annotated
Hobbit, 19).
* * *
Finally, great care must be taken not to confound the idea of the
Shire's having been based on England with a concept found in Tolkien's
earliest writings, that Tol Eressea (Elvenhome) eventually *became*
England. This appeared during his early work on the Book of Lost
Tales (which eventually evolved into the Silm). Very probably it had
been supplanted even before he stopped work on the Lost Tales (1920)
(BoLT I, 22-27). In any case, it had long since been abandoned by the
time LoTR was begun in 1937, and plays no part in the 'history' of
Middle-earth as presented in LotR, Silm, _The Hobbit_, etc.
Letters, 230 (#178), 235 (#181), 250 (#190);
RtMe, 31-33 (2, "Survivals in the West"),
53-54 (3, "Creative anachronisms");
BoLT I, 22-27 (I, "Commentary on _The Cottage of
Lost Play_");
Annotated Hobbit, 19 (ch 1, note 7).
Contributors: WDBL, Wayne Hammond Jr, Bill Taylor
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