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Originally Posted by Child
Tolkien's Shire is not real--not even in its origins and roots. The author's memories of the West Midlands, on which he built the Shire of Middle-earth, were highly selective: the child remembered only what was near to his heart, not the larger picture. Accordingly, the Shire of Middle-earth was an idealized portrait that never existed except in the author's head and the hearts of folk like us who have fallen in love with it.
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The Shire is at once real and unreal. It is very much real to me because in creating it and its people, Tolkien drew on the elements of country life that are clear, vivid and most importantly of all, cherished. He took the gossips, gardeners, pubs and lanes and preseneted these to us as not only his lost idyll but our own. This is what makes The Shire real to us, we can recognise it at once.
But yes, it is also not real, because as anyone with a rural background will know, it's a harsh environment. In my childhood I saw an elderly couple living in abject poverty, sharing a room in a beautiful, yet almost derelict, farmhouse with the chickens; today the poverty might be exemplified by the fact that vegetables are harvested by asylum seekers who live in mobile homes because nobody else will do the work for such poor wages. Yet what is the real countryside to me? As did Tolkien, I left the rural community for an urban life and like him I yearn for the past, but it is always the
idyllic past. It could only be that, as why would I yearn for a life that promised me no work and endless isolation?
In The Shire, Tolkien used his own yearning and nostalgia to create a place that was vividly real, that readers could recognise, yet a place that was real in terms of nostalgia, of something 'lost'. The Shire is like a 'myth' of the English village. Compared to the rural existence lived out in Thomas Hardy's works, which are often mistakenly seen as representing some rural ideal (when they are in fact unremittingly bleak in places) the Hobbits live in relative luxury.
It was essential, too, to have this perfect place which the Hobbits would return to, and which they could work to 'save'. Not only was it Tolkien's own perfect place, but it needed to be the perfect place on Middle earth we could both dream of
and believe we too could live in. Tolkien also created mythical Elven realms which stun us and we yearn to see, but it is The Shire which in the end is protected and saved, while the Elven realms decline. It was The Shire which was Tolkien's own idyll, and the only idyll we could hope to aspire to, and that's why it is both real and unreal.