‘From the many-willowed margin of the immemorial Thames
Standing in a vale outcarven in a world-forgotten day
There is dimply seen uprising through the greenly veiled stems
Many-mansioned tower-crowned in its dreamy robe of grey
That strange city by the river ages in the lives of men
Proudly wrapt in mystic memory overpassing human ken’
-Valedictory, 1911 [first stanza]
One of Tolkien’s motivations in writing The Lord of the Rings was to ‘create a mythology for England’. In doing so, he devised The Shire, rooted in the bucolic landscape in which he spent his formative years both in the outskirts of Birmingham and a place which is close to my own heart, Oxfordshire. The poem above, written by Tolkien at nineteen whilst at Oxford, is dedicated to a real place, written by a young man who would come to understand what it meant to leave somewhere he belonged.
Indeed, there is a particular kind of love that Tolkien communicates purely, the love of place. Not a person, nor an ideal, but a patch of earth. It is found in the Dwarves’ proud tales of Moria’s mountain-halls, in the Rohirrim’s devotion to the plains of Rohan, in every moment the (regularly) homesick hobbits close their eyes and think of their Shire. In many ways, The Lord of the Rings is, at its core, a story about what it means to love, and to lose, a home.
The clearest cautionary examples are also the most dramatic. The Dwarves of Erebor and Moria did not merely love their mountains; they became consumed by them. Their pride in what their forefathers had built in the deep places of Middle-earth grew into a greed, pushing them to dig ever deeper until something terrible was awoken in the dark, the Balrog. Their love of Moria took hold and possessed them. Similarly, Denethor risked the fate of Minas Tirith, one of the great citadels of Men. He would rather the city were to lose its leader and next of kin than be surrendered. In both cases, Tolkien gives us the same warning: a love of home that cannot see beyond itself risks destroying the very thing it seeks to protect.
And then there is the Shire. If the Dwarves loved too greedily, and the men of Gondor too proudly, the hobbits could be accused of loving too innocently. Their naïve belief that the evils of the “big folk” would never breach the borders of the Shire and find its way down their winding country lanes was thoroughly misplaced. For a long while, they were right. But Tolkien, who had seen first-hand what industrialisation had done to the English countryside he adored, understood that innocence can act as unconscious ignorance. The Scourge of the Shire, one of the more moving pieces of the story, is the price that hobbits pay for their insularity. What redeems the Shire, and ultimately saves it, is not the hobbits who stayed, but the four who left. Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin carried the Shire inside them all the way to Mordor and back; their love of home was the fuel that kept them moving when everything else failed. Crucially, it was only because they had left, embarking on a journey which would simultaneously break and rebuild their spirits, that they became the heroes capable of saving the Shire. The Shire is restored not despite the hobbits’ journey, but because of it.
For me personally, this is not merely literary observation. Fields brimming with seasonal crops, the berries growing freely on dark green bushes, the rolling hills with little footpaths over gentle streams—this is Oxfordshire, part of Tolkien's inspiration, and a place I am glad to call home. He was writing about a love he knew firsthand, and a fear he knew firsthand too. After having watching the fields and hedgerows of the Midlands being consumed by factory smoke and the ever-encroaching city, the war came, bringing with it the near-total destruction of an entire generation of young men who had grown up in those same quiet lanes and villages. Tolkien lost many close friends in WWI, including two of the four Tea Club, Barrovian Society members. His love of the countryside endured through those dark times in the muddy trenches of the Somme. It was that love, intact upon his return, that he poured into the Shire. It is no coincidence, then, that Samwise Gamgee does exactly the same thing. On the long road to Mordor, through shadow, starvation, and despair, it is the Shire that Sam holds onto and reminds Frodo of. However, it does not function as an escape, but as a reason to keep going.
The Elves have the most complex relationship with ‘home’. Unlike Men, Hobbits, or Dwarves, they do not love their homes carelessly or possessively. Galadriel and the Elves of Lothlórien had dwelt in Middle-earth for thousands of years, and their love of it may run deeper than any of the other people’s. And yet, crucially, when Frodo offers Galadriel the One Ring, it is refused. As outlined in The Silmarillion, the Elves are a fading people. Immortal though they are, their time in Middle-earth must draw to a close, ending only in the voyage West to Valinor. What stayed this inevitability were the Three Elven Rings: Narya, Nenya, and Vilya. Their power preserved Lothlórien and Rivendell. Due to the binding nature of these Rings to the One Ring, its destruction at Mount Doom rendered them useless. When she refuses the ring, Galadriel is fully aware of this fact. She is not simply resisting potential corruption; she is accepting the end of everything she has come to know and love in Middle-earth. Her refusal reflects a wisdom that Dwarves and Men do not possess: that clutching at the preservation of home is to begin its corruption. The Elves sail West not because they do not love Middle-earth, but because they love it wisely enough to let it go.
Tolkien’s world is built on a love of place. It is also, quietly, a story about what love demands. Samwise Gamgee proves it is the most powerful force in Middle-earth, carrying him all through Mordor, to the fires of Mount Doom. But love requires something in return: the daring willingness to risk, leave or hold it loosely rather than clutch it until it breaks. The Dwarves who dug too deep, the Shire-folk who closed their borders to the world—they lost what they loved because they loved it too tightly. Those hobbits who walked out of their round doors came back strong enough to save it. The Elves, who had understood this truth for millennia, enacted the greatest renunciation of all, sailing away from a world they had cherished since its first age. As Merry tells Pippin on the far side of their own quest: “the soil of the Shire is deep, but there are things deeper and higher”.
- AOL, missing my Shire.
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