[Bêthberry]

Child, I deeply respect your efforts to bring some kind of communal understanding to these very different responses to the Pennsylvania Hobbit Hole.

If I may make a few observations on the very different responses offered here, it is first to suggest--perhaps I should say remind, for those who remember the canonicity thread--that we all responsdto art, architecture, literature, out of our own personal histories and experiences. And that none of those experiences are invalid or wrong.

I find it very interesting that we have on this thread several Brits for whom the style and architecture of this library represents--if I may be allowed the option of interpretive paraphrase--a tawdry approximation, even imitation, of cottage styles which still exist in the Sceptred Isle (a place which I recall Squatter once referring to as the Sceptic Isle--that may be neither here nor there, but simply an example of the allusive nature of memory).

We also have some North Americans who understand that cottage as an imitation, as an imaginative attempt to depict something which may not exist on the North American continent.

Then we also have several other Europeans who immediately perceive the very salient class factors of the article, that the magazine is targeted at a certain market, that the architects and builders work for a particular socio-economic-cultural status in the US.

It appears we have here a prime example of an art which is full of contradictory aims and status. In other words, it is full of problematics--for those who savour such a theoretical tone.

There are several questions we can ask ourselves about this American hobbit hole.

First, how do the class and experience and intentions of the owner of the property and the architects and builders relate to Tolkien? Are they attempting to create something in their imagination that reflects their own personal imagination of Middle-earth or are they attempting to reproduce something Tolkien could have wanted?

Second, how does our experience of our world, our class and culture, reflect in our understanding of Tolkien?

Third, it is patently absurd to think that air conditioning (a critical feature for libraries of conservation, which this might be?) and heat radiant floors and electricity reflect the actual kinds of conditions of hobbit holes in the Third Age or earlier. So, how does one proceed? What possibilities were available to the architects as they met their clients?

Does one attempt an actual historical recreation, something which might closely ressemble a barrow for the dead, but intended for the living--which is how I sometimes think of hobbit holes--or something which uses the available technologies to recreate what we (based obviously in this case on pre-existing 20th C models of hobbit holes) think might be an imaginative recreation of the idea? Are architects restricted to historical veracity and simulacra or are they free to sub-create for themselves?

Pioneers to the Canadian prairies in the 19C dug dwellings out of hills and dirt to survive their first terrible experience of winter on the North American prairie. They did not have the luxury of stone pillars and roofs--as apparently existed in English barrows--but simply dug into the soil and set up small fireplaces with vents. This is much closer to what I think Tolkien might have thought of when he considered "in a hole live a hobbit." Yet even his Shire had varieties of social status. How to reflect that?

We are all of us allowed our chance to interpret and imagine a version of "in a hole lived a hobbit" in our 21st C world. Is it terribly wrong if that imagination does not suit or fit or satisfy the imagintion of those closer to Tolkien's own culture, class and society? Who is to say that imagination must be bound to Squatter's sceptic isle?

What I find infinitely fascinating about the article is that there apparently is a wealthy collector of Tolkien manuscripts who has decided to store his collection on his own private property rather than loan them to an academic institution, as is the general trend of such things these days in NA.

He--or she--isn't sharing.