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The struggle you guys have eloquently expressed causes me to look at the ent/entwife struggle. Isnt their rift similar to the struggle described afore here? One side embracing the Sheparding of the land, the other embracing Nature, unmolested. The inevitability that those camps would part ways, never to join as one again? how sad....
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Drigel
I am not sure if the contrast is that stark, although some may feel differently. At least I do not sense such a sharp dichotomy in my own mind and that of the author. Tolkien never seemed to have trouble accepting the fact that a landscape touched by man could have its own beauty. The prime example is the Shire. The problem lies not in the crafting of gardens but in a disregard for the needs of the earth.
I do think it's possible to live and have respect for the land yet still use it productively. The balance, of course, is subtle. Yet we are subcreators and part of that instinct could be reflected in someone like Sam who had a gift to protect and tend the earth.
Perhaps the problem with Ent and Entwife did not lay in the different pursuits they had chosen but rather in the lack of communication between them.