[Child of the 7th Age]

Tigerlilly --

Bless you for putting this topic up on the boards. You have stumbled upon something for which I have very strong, personal feelings.

It's very strange, but when I read LotR back in the mid-sixties, one of the main things it did was to fuel a desire in me to learn more about the ancient and medieval past. I was in a factory neighborhood where no one even went to college, let alone graduate school. But I am also very stubborn and eventually managed to go on and earn a doctorate in medieval history. I even got to teach in college a few years. I loved it. The kids even liked me.

But we had to move to another town, and I had to start job huntng all over again. And things had definitely changed. It was impossible for me to find work in my chosen pofession. My husband and I both applied for jobs where there would be 300-500 applicants. Very crazy and impossible!

I eventually retrained and became a librarian. I did this because jobs existed in the field, but also because it was the one educational institution that didn't have such strict guidelines or preconceptions. If a child came in and wanted a book on mythology, no one tried to argue and say he shouldn't have it because it wasn't practical or wasn't directly related to career prepartion. I grew to love wowrking in libraries, and I'm not sad I switched.

But I am sad about what happened in colleges and universities in this country. In the 60s, students (including me!) had petititioned for the abolishng of all core courses. What this did was to cut out liberal arts and humanities courses from the curriculum, in whole or part, and history went right out the door with them. Gradually, college became more and more a place to prepare yourself solely for a "career". The idea of understanding your heritage or even learning to think was definitely secondary. The great god of practicality had reared his head and chased out so much good before him.

Today, I would argue, we still view college as primarily a place to prepare yourself to earn a lot of money in the workforce. Bilbo's ideal, and the ideal of the Elves, only hangs around on the fringes of academia. Yes, the Bilbos and Elves are still there, but it's often hard to get funding for the liberal arts except in a few choice (and often expensive!) institutions.

Even in the lower grades, history has largely been thrown out the door, replaced by a mishmash of general social studies. So , in a sense, we are getting what we deserve--students who have no sense even of their own country's heritage, let alone the general tenor and themes of western civilization or world history.

I have tried very hard to make sure my own children do not fall into this category of human beings totally ignorant of their historical and cultural heritage. And I have been so very pleasantly surprised to see many young people posting on this site who know so very much about history and literature (in my mind, these two go hand in hand). I am not naive enough to think you are in a "majority" at your schools, but the very fact you exist at all is little short of a miracle.

As far as history being focused on the great and powerful, that's what history textbooks teach---a long recitation of facts and dates that deal with the rich and powerful who are in control at the top. But this is only part of history. It is possible to go beyond this, and to find books that look at a much wider picture. I was a social historian, which means I studied classes and people who were definitely not in the top tier. My dissertation was on the gentry in te county of Essex, England in the later middle ages--human people who would have been similar in wealth and education to hobbits like Bilbo and Frodo in the shire. I had other friends who tried to dig up things about peasants (i.e. the Sam Gamgees of the world) from the manorial rolls. So it is possible to go beyond the people at the very top, but you have to look in unexpected places and be imaginative. It's not easy, but it is fun.

I think there are people out there who are still hungry for myth, legend, and history. The movie has helped some people rediscover that these things can have some value and meaning even in the 21st century. And I think Tolkien would still be proud that his books could open people up to many of the things he loved.

So I am very greatful to the role the movie has played, especially among middle school, high school, and college age people If only, there would also be change in our educational institutions. But I guess we can only say that, right now, change comes one person at a time.

As far as the hobbits go, I always thought it was part of Eru's plan that the hobbits would stay a very low key and unknown people until that moment when Gandalf would let Bilbo and Frodo know that they had been chosen to do something very important. And then they had the choice to say "yes" or "no". Well, they said yes, and we all knows where it went from there. If the hobbits had had a real "history", others might have been aware of that history,and those "others" then might have been keeping a closer eye on them. And that could have led to disastrous results.

It's interesting to me how "unknown" hobbits were to many of the other peoples of the third age--even Treebeard and some of the cultures of Men. They hadn't heard of them or thought they were the stuff of legend. And it's also ineresting that most of the Elve's songs were really historical in nature, and none of the hobbit songs were like that. In my mind, this ties into the whole theme of the hobbits needed to be a secret people, good at sneaking around quietly. In a sense, both Frodo and Bilbo were burglars, on a mission to do something very quietly--the opposite of what a typical hero would be or do. They both needed to sneak into someone else's house (Smaug, Sauron) and do somthing unexpected.

And Tigerlilly, you must work near Dearborn, Michigan. Don't you? My family home was three miles from the museum (if that's where you work). I grew up in Detroit, and went to Kalamazoo College. I love the Great Lakes!

sharon, the 7th age hobbit