Fictional worlds that survive close scrutiny

Cafe Society
61

The Shire, as a stand-in for England That Never Was, is obviously going to be able to make or have access to the Things That Make Life Worth Living. Clocks, fine cloth, brass buttons for waistcoats; that sort of thing. Of course, what we see of hobbitish culture implies they’re not the sorts to have coal mines, brass smelting, textile mills, or anything like that. (Actually, that’s the sort of evil stuff Sharkey gets up to.)

So, they probably buy it all from the Blue Mountain dwarves. Although the dwarves don’t seem much in the way of textile mills, either. And the only humans around seem to be at Bree. So I guess we know why Bree is around.

Presumably, hobbits trade pipeweed as their cash crop. Which is really the sort of crop you want cheap labor to harvest – migrant workers, maybe. Toiling away so the hobbits can toke.

Of course the real question is: given the importance of tea-time in hobbit culture… where does the tea come from?? The Shire’s climate really isn’t conducive to tea cultivation.

62

I was always wondering where the Shire got their roads. Who built them? Who maintained them? Who built their houses? Who was responsible for the infrastructure?

63

:confused: Woddahell? Why would hobbits need textile mills to make fine cloth? I just pointed out that they make handlooms, and you can make beautiful cloth on handlooms, just as all human societies did before the 19th century. Hell, it’s explicitly attested that even Galadriel and her maidens weave cloth, presumably on handlooms.

And while hobbits don’t mine coal, they probably burn charcoal, at least sufficiently for all their domestic metalworking needs. Brass buttons, yeah, they probably get those from the dwarves (especially since they seem to have been considered something of a luxury item).

For one thing, there’s no a priori reason to think that the drink whose name is translated from Westron into English as “tea” is necessarily exactly the same as our Camellia sinensis: all we know is that it’s a brewed drink presumably from some kind of dried leaf. For another thing, there are some varieties of Camellia sinensis that can be grown in mild temperate climates such as Cornwall and Washington State.

“Got” their roads? The roads (unpaved, of course) would have been formed the way they always have been in rural pre-modern societies: they start out as footpaths produced by repeated traversal of a particular route by humans or animals, and then perhaps are artificially broadened for wheeled vehicles. Filling, grading or hardening is done on an ad hoc basis using local materials.

Who built their houses (or in most cases, holes)? Builders, presumably, though probably most hobbits had the basic DIY skills for communal hole-building, just as traditional communities such as the Amish can build their own barns.

As for who does the “town planning”, the Shire proper seems to have been a sort of loosely organized clan system in parallel with an even more loosely organized elective municipal administration, namely, Mayors and Shirrifs. Tuckborough and Buckland appear to have been exclusively feudal/clan societies, under the ultimate authority of the Thain and the Master, respectively.

If you’re not projecting the needs of industrial societies onto the Shire, ISTM that it works pretty well as a functional fictional community. Certainly, there’s nothing about its material culture that’s prima facie unworkable.

64

It’s not projecting: the abundance of material goods in the Shire requires an industrial society to support. And we have a ready-to-hand model of what that society looks like: industrialized England.

Bilbo’s life of leisure would be supported by an underclass of laborers that we don’t see depicted. Even Sam Gamgee, our representative “everyman” hobbit, is of a relatively higher social status than the laborers required of an agricultural society supporting a leisure class.

65

Cite? What makes you think that, for example, the Shire is more “industrialization-dependent” than a prosperous city of pre-industrial England?

Of course we see them depicted, e.g., in the character of Sam Gamgee’s own father and the hired hands of Farmer Maggot. Sam has a marginally superior social rank only because he’s the personal servant of a wealthy hobbit family who have encouraged his advancement (by “learning him his letters”, for example).

66

You provided your own cite: pre-industrial England. In pre-industrial England, the country life of leisure that Bilbo is depicted as leading would have required an entire estate’s worth of resources and servants. Bilbo only employs a gardener.

67

Can we admit one (well, two) things however, in regards to the Shire/industrialization debate?

The Shire of the movies is a product of an industrialized civilization, no doubt about it. Everything looks machine made and very few things are hand-carved. (Hell, even Bilbo’s handwriting could be used as a font!) I can imagine it would have cost a pretty penny if Peter Jackson demanded that the set designers were limited to 16th-century tools and methods. :wink:

The Shire of the novels doesn’t have to be… it just depends upon your imagination. You want a perfectly round button? Imagine it. Want a button that looks different from all the other buttons because they’re all hand made? Have at it. Want wide roads? No problem. Want roads that, nowadays, would be no better than narrow, well-worn paths? Go for it.

68

Sorry, but this makes no sense. Bilbo isn’t living on an isolated self-sustaining “estate”, he’s a bachelor in a large comfortable dwelling among other smaller dwellings near the center of a market town. He deals with the baker, the grocer, the butcher, the brewer, the tailor, the miller, etc., all of whom are part of the Shire-wide economy.

He and one personal servant (later with the assistance of his nephew) do all the ordinary domestic work of that dwelling, but that’s not really such a big deal, especially for hard-working hobbits. I’m sure he gets in outside workers for, say, annual cleaning, just as he does when he throws a big party.