Bethberry
The passages I quoted were very selective - Flora Thompson also describes the poverty & everyday struggle of the people - which is why her account of her early life is so moving. But to focus solely on the starkness & harshness of that life is as mistaken as focussing solely on the simple beauty of it. For all the struggles she & her friends & family knew, she is full of regret for what had been lost. She lived through it, & she saw value in it, & knew that something important had been lost.
Its the same with the focus on the 'horrors' of WW1. Yes, horrors there were, but many of the men who fought believed in the cause they fought for, valued the comradeship & were proud of their service. By no means were Owen & Sassoon typical of the men who served. (Interesting points made in Tolkien & the Great War). In short, many of those who fought didn't think of WW1 as a futile exercise or as nothing more than an example of 'man's inhumanity to man' writ large.
Point being, those who lived through such times saw them differently to most of us. Just as Flora Thompson can find beauty amid the poverty, & place a value on that beauty, so can Tolkien. There is poverty in the Shire, but the fact that it isn't focussed on doesn't mean that Tolkien is deliberately 'caricaturing' that world, or being ironic. I think he is presenting what he loved about that world honestly. If he doesn't spend time presenting us with what he hated about it (though we can glimpse it if we look hard enough, & we see it in the state of the Shire when the hobbits return) that's no more dishonest than emphasising a loved ones good points.
(This is what I think Tolkien meant by 'parody', though I think the term is a little extreme - its certainly not 'burlesque', or we wouldn't care about the world or its inhabitants. Its a positive parody in Tolkien's case, & I don't get any sense that he's setting out to mock or belittle the people & culture he's writing about. He simply plays up the people's foibles. As to parodying the toponomy, I think he's 'idealising' the names of places. Its an archetypal rural England - as Rohan is an archetypal Anglo Saxon England)
In short, I chose the quotations from Lark Rise not to try & imply that village life in the 1880's was ideal, but to show that to the people who lived it, it was full of beauty & magic.
And besides, how significant is the last sentence I quoted:
Quote:
|
Bands of little blue butterflies flitted here & there or poised themselves on quivering wings on the long grass bents; bees hummed in the white clover blooms, & over all a deep silence brooded. It seemed as though the road had been made ages before, then forgotten.
|