September 2, 2023 - 8:00am
When he created hobbits, J.R.R. Tolkien had in mind the sturdy English yeomen of his early life. “They love peace and quiet and good tilled earth,” we are told. They are straightforward, honest folk who dislike complex machines, mind their own business, and retire to the pub at the end of the day. Their community, the Shire, is small, close-knit and self-contained, cut off from the cares of the wider world. They are, spiritually, an island race.
Tolkien made no secret of his affinity for this way of life, famously writing in a letter to a fan that “I am in fact a Hobbit […] I like gardens, trees, and unmechanised farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food […] I do not travel much.” This attitude is a longstanding motif of a particular English mentality, in which the real England lies in the countryside, in the manor house and the churchyard and the hedgerow, in old maids hiking to Communion through the mists of the autumn morning. Tolkien draws on this by making the Shire a kind of moral centre for the whole epic, drawing on his nostalgia for the vanished meadows and lanes of his boyhood.
Instinctively I am drawn to this way of thinking. And yet today, on the fiftieth anniversary of Tolkien’s death, I do find myself wondering whether the enormous popularity of his work — as well as the seductive pastoral vision of the Shire portrayed in Peter Jackson’s excellent film adaptations — has contributed to one of the enduring problems of modern British life: our suspicion of industry, dynamism, urban growth and innovation. This tendency is as old as the Industrial Revolution itself. William Blake’s complaint about “dark satanic mills” is more than two centuries old. In the 1820s William Cobbett was already grumbling about the expansion of cities and pining for the unspoiled Arcadia of his youth in Surrey.
At least two incidents in The Lord Of The Rings — the refortification of Isengard and the Scouring of the Shire — are clearly intended to portray development and increasing economic sophistication in a negative light. The problem is that in the modern era, conservative-minded people’s too-frequent aesthetic and cultural disdain for the engines of prosperity, such as construction, finance, energy exploration and container ports, has genuine costs. It means more expensive housing and fewer, less well-paid jobs. It means less growth, which means less money for warships and hospitals and roads. Only this week the campaign group Britain Remade reported that infrastructure in the UK costs vastly more than in comparable countries, not least because opponents of particular projects have so many opportunities to veto, review, slow down and halt the work.
None of this should be regarded as a wholehearted planting of my flag on the terrain of progress at all costs. I am a hobbit by temperament and lifestyle. I love the line given to Bilbo Baggins in the Jackson films: “Things are made to endure in the Shire, passing from one generation to the next.” But I am also a patriot who wants Britain to prosper, and to recover her national mojo. Ours is no longer the world in which Tolkien grew up, nor even the one in which he spent his last years. We must resist the temptation towards stasis, the impulse to coast on the delightful but diminishing legacy of a vanishing England. Tolkien himself was very careful to note that the Shire is not self-sustaining, dependent as it is on outsiders for security.
Perhaps the marking of the half-century since the great man’s departure for the Undying Lands is a good occasion to reinvigorate our idea of what Britain might be.
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SubscribeNonsense. The “Shire” of modern Britain is not being spoiled for the sake of industry or progress; it is falling to the concrete jungle in order to accommodate unprecedented levels of inward migration. What Tolkien would have said about that, I shudder to think. As for modern industry, it could easily be accommodated on the broken down brownfield sites in which modern Britain abounds. Factories of this kind are notably less dependent on the high consumption of fuel than their technological ancestors and require few operatives. With five million economically inactive adults in the country, there is no way that business must be staffed by yet another cohort of newcomers. In short, this article is rather less than open with its readers.
Thought it was the concrete itself that was falling ? Especially the stuff in schools.
If one consults the magnificent collection of aerial photographs held by Historic England (HE) it is quite clear how “Hobbitland” is being rapidly destroyed.
For example Robbie K (below) quotes his experience of Suffolk. If one then looks at say the once idyllic little town of LAVENHAM, via the HE collection, it is all too obvious how the ‘concrete cancer is inexorably spreading.
A few miles away in Constable’s East Bergholt, the same again, and similarly all along the Brett Valley.
As to the ‘economically inactive’, as you so kindly call them, their needs to be a massive overhaul of the benefit/scrounger system. This may occasion ‘civil unrest’*but better to ‘lance the boil now’ than let it overwhelm us. We OWE it our it to our great grandchildren, if nobody else.
(* What’s left of the Army should be able to manage that………just.)
I’m visiting Suffolk later this month, i’ll check on that.
Oh, and someone may already have pointed this out but its old maids “biking” to communion, not “hiking”.
Lavenham is cute, but not really somewhere to live. Make sure you visit Framlingham, and Bury St Emunds, but I suggest you give Ipswich a wide berth.
“CUTE” !!!!!!?
Come on Mr Solomon you are normally a stickler for DICTION!
Some lovely buildings there, also Clare. Woodbridge is nice too.
Yes indeed much of its former ‘glory’ remains, even if surrounded by the chemical desert.
The one catastrophic loss was the huge Benedictine Abbey Church of Bury St Edmunds, one of the three finest churches in England. IMHO.
Sorry! My first instinct was to say ‘cutesy’ (perhaps ‘twee’might be closer to the mark.)
If you have any interest in medieval stuff make sure you visit UFFORD, close to Woodbridge. The church contains the finest medieval Font Cover in England. Standing 20’ high, this 15th century masterpiece even survived destruction by the notorious 17th century iconoclast William Dowsing!
Here is Dowsing’s diary entry for his August 1644 visit to Ufford:
“There is a glorious cover over the font, like a pope’s
triple crown, with a pelican on the top, picking its breast, all gilt over with gold. And we were kept out above 2 hours, and neither churchwardens, William Brown, nor Roger Small, that were injoyned these things above 3 months afore, had not done them in May, and I sent one then to see it done, and they would not let him have the key. And now, neither the churchwardens, nor William Brown, nor the Constable James Tokelove, and William Gardener the Sexton, would not let us have the key in 2 hours “.
In other words the church wardens were NOT going to let him destroy it, and thus it still stands!
Perhaps fortuitously the loathsome Dowsing was
‘fired’ later that year.
Visit Ufford to see the unique 15th century 20’ high Font Cover.
My originally slightly longer post on this subject has been censored, which really is the final straw!
Thanks (everyone) for the tips. I’ll be time-limited, and already planning to take in Aldeburgh, Orford Ness, Dedham Vale, with Ely & Cambridge on the way back.
I’ll be based in Stowmarket (taking part in an exhibition there) and will look up those other places to see if i can fit them in.
Be sure to take a glance at Stowmarket’s former ‘workhouse’ said to be the finest in England.
Completed in 1781 and originally called Stow Lodge it is a fine red brick Georgian building, slightly damaged by the NHS, and is now flats. It is in the western outskirts of the town of Union Rd/Onehouse Rd.
Stowmarket’s Railway Station is also a remarkably fine neo-Jacobean
building.
Orford Castle is also a spectacular 12th structure, remarkably intact and a better bet than nearby Framingham ( although the church with the Howard tombs is worth a glance.)
If near Long Melford, the outstanding 15th century stained glass in the fine church is worth a moment.
Go for a row on the river at Dedham. I have family there. Constable country is a beautiful place.
Dedham is in ESSEX!
Please don’t. There are enough people here already. Have you thought of travelling to Scotland? Very empty and quite picturesque in parts.
Well said. The character and beauty of England are once again under threat from the usual cohort of philistines and “philanthropists”, determined to do “good” at everyone else’s expense. As to “economically inactive” – I know! One falls far too easily into the mealy-mouthed jargon of the modern administrative class – partly from fear of censorship. Far better to express oneself with vivid sincerity…
“… their needs to be a massive overhaul of the benefit/scrounger system. This may occasion ‘civil unrest’*but better to ‘lance the boil now’ than let it overwhelm us.”
What does this mean?
The current ‘benefit system’, otherwise known the dole, is far too generous, and it is also unaffordable.
It has to be reformed, or cut back in plain English.
This may ultimately mean rioting or worse.QED?
Thanks for that.
I read the Gaurdian now and then for the good of my soul, and they constantly claim that the current benefits system is both impossibly complex to ‘navigate’ and far less generous than ever before. You have better information, it seems, and perhaps you could say (the Graudian never gets down to the vulgar details) just how much a family of say four, thrown suddenly and through no fault of their own into unemployment, would be able to claim from the ever-over-generous Mr Hunt? On average, or at best. Information is the enemy of prejudice, as ever!
Hobbitland is perfectly attainable if we want it.
If we stopped immigration we would barely need to build any homes to satisfy demand.
If we scrapped inheritance tax, the 10.9M (and rapidly rising) houses currently owned by retirees mortgage free would in time pass to their children and we could look forward to a time where perhaps 2/3rds of the population pay no tax or mortgage (imagine what unprecedented opportunities that could bring for people!)
Remote working means more people not having to move or commute to the metropolis.
Without the immigration of course we would have to adjust our lifestyle (in line with Tolkien’s): looking after our own elderly parents instead of putting them in a home; mums staying at home with their children until they start primary school; home cooking instead of takeaways; fewer items of Chinese cr*p from Amazon; fewer and more expensive taxis, fixing and maintaining things rather than replacing with the shiniest new thing, washing our own cars, walking our own dogs etc.
These changes would be necessary if we chose to stop the flow of migrants but I think they would be good for our soul and get us out of our current malaise.
Except that the price of houses is determined by the amount of money chasing them. All that extra money would push the price up further, further excluding those whose parents weren’t well off, and soaking up the extra money that the children of the better off had acquired.
Or do you think we would all just stay in the villages we were born in, like the Middle Ages.
The price of houses is determined by supply and demand. If there was no immigration, there would be much reduced demand. Reduced demand means falling house prices. This would benefit those people without legacies that wished to buy a house.
My wider point is that if you severely limit immigration, you need to pay more for services like childcare or elderly care. Or you do it within the family. That is much easier if you live close to your extended family members. So I suspect that would be a side-effect.
Btw living and dying in your hometown is perfectly common today and was considered normal 50 years ago. It wasn’t just something from the Middle Ages.
I am fully with you on this one Matt, I went meandering in the South West last week for two days and found myself in the Dartmoor region and came upon one of the happiest, nicest towns I have been in for years. Everyone I spoke with (I have a habit of chatting with people wherever I go) had been born there of parents born there. The town was beautiful, thriving, but not touristy, full of independent shops and such a happy vibe, everyone seemed to know each other and be open, chatty and smiley. They were also very civilised, I can’t put my finger on it, it wasn’t wealth gentility, it just seemed to be a society that worked really well.
Tavistock or Okehampton?
Spot on Charles – Tavistock.
To be honest, the housing market over the last few decades has in many ways relatively favoured the unimaginative and unadventurous. Staying close to mum and dad, marrying someone you went to school with, relying on local middle class networks, buying a house and watching it go up in value with no effort – and staying put. But it doesn’t make for a dynamic country.
Also I live in the south west. What you are seeing is the front – behind the scenes it’s a bit different.
I also live in the south west and have done for nigh on 15 years, I know both sides of the coin David.
Only if demand decreased sufficiently to offset the extra money chasing property would the price even remain the same!
Immigration may be a factor, but it’s not the only one driving up house prices.
Pre 1970 the mortgage was based upon four times husbands salary and plus 10 % deposit. Once two salaries could be included in mortgage and up to six times combined earnings, amount of money chasing property went up.
I’m not so sure the author has this right about the English dreaming of the Shire, although a very nice setting. I would have thought most people have a vision more akin to The Darling Buds of May and escaping city life.
I went through that process and acquired a lovely thatched cottage in rural Suffolk. After a few years it became clear I was actually living in a giant farm and the ‘countryside’ is an illusion.
This is when I realised I am a townie, and prefer all the benefits of the communities, pubs, shops and facilities. The irony also being that I am surrounded by nature reserves and have access to far more lovely walks than I did in the ‘country’.
You picked the wrong place for your rural idyll, Suffolk like the rest of East Anglia is either a ‘chemical desert’ or a ‘concrete jungle’. It
may some have impressive ecclesiastical and vernacular buildings, BUT the ‘soul’ of let us say ‘Akenfield’* is long dead.
May I suggest much further north or west if you try again?
(* Ronald Blythe 1922- 2023)
I’m uncertain about the appeal of Akenfield to be honest. The reason we moved to this area was Mrs K’s ancestors were here and she has spent a great deal of time on genealogical research tracing the line. This history is not a pretty picture, with most of them working as farm labourers in destitution and disease, with big families and lots of graves. I also happened upon Cobbold’s histories of Victorian villages, which has some unbelievable real life stories which are equally traumatic.
Not quite the Shire!
Blythe’s book came as quite a shock in 1969! The idyll of rural England was exposed as a rather unpleasant fraud, just as you say,
.Did you ever visit the 1934 ‘Tithe War’Memorial at Elmsett?
Not that one, but I did stumble upon the one at Wortham once. Not quite as grand.
A different older building I once owned attracted local church tithes, I had to get an insurance policy for it before the purchase would go through!
“has contributed to one of the enduring problems of modern British life: our suspicion of industry, dynamism, urban growth and innovation.”
When one starts from a proposition that is fundamentally false then there is no worth in going any further. Only eco-nutters that represent a miniscule fraction of the British public hold these views.
I have lived in small villages my entire life. I regard industry, dynamism and innovation as wonderful things that have greatly improved the lot of humanity. I have no objection to urban growth.
My concern is with concreting over the beautiful countryside I love to accommodate a rise in population driven by unprecedented mass immigration. That has nothing to do with Tolkien’s unbearably tedious works.
“It means more expensive housing and fewer, less well-paid jobs. It means less growth, which means less money for warships and hospitals and roads.”
The funny thing tho is that the more we ‘grow’ the more expensive almost everything seems to get in fact. *Real* standards of living for working people have been going down for four decades. Yet somehow the plutocrats continue to succeed in selling ‘growth’ as a good thing.
GDP per Capita is what matters …
The funniest part of the article – other the image of of a well equipped gaggle of oldmaids hiking (rather than biking) – was the horror that there would be fewer warships! Tolkien had his own view of war engines (even allied ones) and could talk from a position of high authority. I think Mr Gooch needs to read the books of Tolkien rather than make comments on a film by Peter Jackson. The shire has many problems in the books which the film doesn’t have time to go into.
Correct. Also, the very English hobbits of Tolkien’s books morphed into very Oirish/Celtic scallywags for, I assume, US marketing reasons in the films, making a nonsense of characterisation. The films and the books are quite different propositions.
I can relieve your anxiety – the Shire is actually modelled on the Bernese Oberland, experienced by the young JRR travelling with his brother and his aunt in 1911.
Did he by any chance visit the Reichenbach Falls, where ‘you know who fell off’, do you happen to know?
The British are 99% convinced that Mordor is Russia, while Tolkien-loving American acquaintances tend to be libertarian and assume those dark, alchemical hell-fires burn above and below the coal stations of communist China.
And the anti-cultural left is represented by Saruman and Isengard.
I think you’ll find most of the English equate Mordor with London – the Shard looking pleasingly like Barad Dur.
I think the author can rely on the hypocrisy of well off brits. They like the shire (or at least the Cotswolds) but they like money a lot more. There’ll be plenty of money making, and despoiling of the countryside going on – just not in their back yard.
Thirty and more years ago the Cotswolds was already overcrowded with Levantine looking ‘gentleman ‘sporting old Etonian ties, Blazers and Cravats.
Most came from London, thus making the M4 a nightmare, particularly on Sunday nights.
Has anything changed?
Wealthy yoga moms with expensive handbags complaining they can’t drive their horse boxes along the country lanes for all the Waitrose delivery vans blocking the way.
The Shire dependent on outsiders for its security. Rather like Europe’s long dependence on the US instead of maintaining its own armed forces.
There is nothing wrong with some sentimental national mythologizing. We Americans are quite good at it, with our cowboy and Indian tales. While most non-Native Americans identified with the cowboys (bold settlers conquering a new frontier), the Indians (noble savages defending their homeland with an amazing warrior ethic) always had their admirers. Now the Indians are the good guys and the cowboys, the bad guys.
That is the “real America” that corresponds to Tolkien’s Shire. The *real* real America, of course, has more to do with shopping malls, busy downtowns, depressed ghettos, and boring but comfortable suburbs.
Lord of the Rings had a big influence among American and British young in the 1960s and 70s, as witnessed by tracks from Led Zeppelin and other rock groups. It can be argued that Lord of the Rings and Californian culture, culminating in the Summer of Love, is the root of modern environmentalism.
I made the mistake of capitalising a word for emphasis. The moderating machine appears to be suspicious of such devices. I have edited the offering and it appears immediately above this one – for the moment.
‘the sturdy English yeomen of his early life’ ?
Guess it’s not so widely known that Tolkien lived 350 years!
Seriously, reconstructions and depictions of this England are very much a product of outsiders – Tolkien was born in the Orange Free State, Jackson in New Zealand.
The most notable habit of people who had to live in that England was that they migrated from it.
Dumetrius’s comment shows a fair amount of ignorance. Tolkien was certainly born in South Africa, but his family were only there because his father had been sent out by the (English) bank which employed him. His father died out there when Tolkien was three years old, but his family were already back in England (his father had decided to return anyway). I hardly think that he can be called an ‘outsider’, and he never showed any desire to ‘migrate’ from England.
‘the sturdy English yeomen of his early life’ ? When was Tolkien born exactly ?
Seriously, reconstructions and depictions of this England are very much a product of outsiders – Tolkien was born in the Orange Free State, Jackson in New Zealand.
The most notable habit of people who had to live in that England was that they migrated from it.
SAY WHAT??? But in a world where “Snow White” (why the revisionists want to promote “whiteness” is beyong me!) is a man-eater and the “dwarves” are multisexuals of course a sane world with decent human beings who respect life, liberty and property is just too too much … for those who want to be “liked” by the LEFT
A seductive portrait.
And yet it’s not our Yeomen tiling the fields is it. It’s an army of foreign migrants, often coming here on a seasonal basis to do the rural work we don’t do ourselves anymore. Something like only 11% of agriculture workers are non-migrants.
And yet one often finds the most vociferous rantings against this trend are those inhabiting the rural idylls, quietly no doubt pulling the curtains so as not to see the conditions in which some of the workers have to exist so they can eat UK grown tomatoes or cucumbers or whatever. Then off to the Golf Club to rattle in an echo chamber of disgust at all this while convincing themselves that the Bulgarian picker living in an portacabin so M&S can have their usual selections is somehow causing a rural housing shortage.
Another day, another rant about Tory Toffs and Brexit-voting Little Englanders from self-declared champion of the underdog, voice of the voiceless (and Alastair Campbell fanboy) j watson.
Watson is one of those contrarian commentators who prefers what might be called the anti-echo chamber. It still provides confirmation and recognition, but of a different kind.
It is odd, isn’t it? There are a few individuals who seem to get off on coming here for their daily punishment beating.
As opposed to getting their firmly entrenched prejudices and biases confirmed, you mean?
We need genuine contrarians to challenge our thinking. Otherwise Unherd is just Herd.
Upvote from me for a post in the spirit that Unherd should be all about: challenging complacency and group think with a few “reality sandwiches”.
Suspect you’ll get more downvotes though.
We need a new Akenfield*to record this pseudo rural idyll, before the AI robots take command.
(* Or perhaps an update on ‘Brave New World’.)