Guinevre, thank you for some interesting quotations from the Letters. I was very drawn to Tolkien's use of the word 'parody', within quotation marks, to describe both the typography and the inhabitants. What I would give for a fuller explanation of his understanding of parody!
I went back to read all of Letter #190; it is one of Tolkien's angriest I think, because the translators have not just translated the names into a cultural milieu which makes little sense of the original, but has also done so so badly, with little knowledge of and sensitivity to Dutch linquistic heritage. I think two other parts of that letter deserve to be quoted here.
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The Translator has (on internal evidence) glanced at but not used the Appendices. He seems incidentally quite unaware of difficulties he is creating for himself later. The 'Anglo Saxon' of the Rohirrim is not much like Dutch. In fact, heis pulling to bits with very clumsy fingers a web that he had made only a slight attempt to understand ....
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Anyway I'm not going to be treated ŕ la Mrs Tiggywinkle = Poupette ŕ l'épingle. Not that B[eatrix] P[otter] did not give translators hell. Though possibly from securer grounds than I have. I am no linguist, but I do know something about nomenclature, and have specially studied it, and I am actually very angry indeed.
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Hilde Bracegirdle and others, too , thanks for pointing out the anachronistic mentions of umbrellas and clocks and carriages. I wonder perhaps if we could at least say that such references point to a particular kind of mechanical contrivance, those of earlier developments rather than the totalising factories of the Industrial Revolution.
Squatter, Child and I were discussing in PM the very point you make about Pip and Merry, Frodo and Sam, and Bilbo, that they shared traits not well accepted in The Shire. Good call, too, I think, to suggest that Tolkien himself shared this elven wander lust in his desire to seek greater knowledge of languages and cultures. How very interesting a difference there is between him and his brother Hillary!
Child,
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Tolkien was very much a family man. My guess is that the goodness that shines through the Shire actually reflects two things. On the one hand, there were his memories of his boyhood, including the physical environment of the Midlands, something that's already been discussed on this thread. But there's something else as well. Tolkien was a husband and father. Shire life is essentially family life and I think he must have looked to the model of his own household for some of that. There would have been no Hobbits and, by implication, no Lord of the Rings unless Tolkien the father sat and told stories to his children. The "small" life that Tolkien describes, with both its good points and its shortcomings, was something that he found deep within his own heart. And, because it has a basis in personal reality, it is very compelling to many of us, even those who in our own time preferred to go chasing after Elves!
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Ah, yes, like you I went chasing after elves, and have returned to a more domestic community, but one that is, I think, a little removed from that which, as Tolkien says in the letter
Guinevre quoted, is a 'parody.' I think you are very right to point out Tolkien's strong sense of family. However, I am not so sure I would see his own personal adult life reflected in The Shire's web of social connections. I think back more to his childhood and recall his own loss of his father at--what, the age of four?--and then of his mother at the age of twelve and the upheavals of guardianship and many different domestic arrangements which followed the joyful days at Sarehole. Imagine his aunt burning his mother's letters, having no sense of how precious they might be to him and Hilary! To me, the haunting sense of nostalgia for this community might derive in some sense from the fact that Tolkien himself never experienced a 'regular' family and social situation in his childhood.
This is, however, just a suggestion, as I recall Tolkien's own point in the Foreword that the relation between life and art is very complex and far less direct than many critics would be able to unravel. Sometimes, I think, it is very easy to be so influenced by the charm and eloquence of the art that we think the very stuff and strength of the writing must derive from real life and not from the imagination or creation.
In defense of this, I would make a personal observation of something I have experienced. I have myself complimented someone on how his writing made me feel very strongly the emotion contained in the writing, with my sense that here must be personal experience out of which he was writing or referring to. And I was wrong, as I came know, for the personal experience does not exist, quite as directly as I had thought. I had responded to this writer's eloquence and art and his ability to recreate in a very different context, something which
perhaps had a germ growing in real life. It was a most amazing experience for me, for here I had fallen into the very spell of words and art which normally I strive very hard to respect, that this must be real and not artistic illusion. And the writer in question? Oh, he was tickled pink. It was the greatest compliment I could have given him.