Bethberry
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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.
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Of course, it could simply be that he was, in the Shire, presenting us with an image of the world he grew up in, which did have umbrellas, clocks & carriages, but nothing more complex. Anyone who wants an insight into the kind of childhood world Tolkien knew should read Flora Thompson's autobiography, Lark Rise to Candleford. Flora lived as a child in an Oxfordshire village in the last quarter of the 19th century, & the kind of world she describes could have come straight from the early chapters of LotR:
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Spring brought a flush of green wheat & there were violets under the hedges & pussey willows out beside the brook at the bottom of the 'Hundred Acres';.. the ripened cornfields rippled up to the doorsteps of the cottages & the hamlet became an island in a sea of dark gold....
(describing the cottages) Other rooms were bright & cosy, with dressers of crockery, cushioned chairs, pictures on the walls & brightly coloured hand made rag rugs on the floor. In these there would be pots of geraniums, fuschias, & old-fashioned sweet-smelling musk on the windowsills. In the older cottages there were grandfather's clocks, gate legged tables, & rows of pewter, relics of a time when life was easier for country folk.
(Speaking of herself & her brother) They had no need to ask the names of the birds, flowers & trees they saw everyday, for they had already learned these unconsciously, & neither could remember a time when they did not know an oak from an ash, wheat from barley, or a jenny wren from a blue-tit.
The white tails of rabbits bobbed in & out of the hedgerows; stoats crossed the road in front of the children's feet - swift, silent, stealthy creatures which made them shudder; there were squirrels in the oak trees, & once they even saw a fox curled up asleep in the ditch beneath thick overhanging ivy. 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.
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And that was a real village, 19 miles from Oxford, in the 1880's. It could have been (for Tolkien probably was) the Shire. Imagine having that, & then having it taken from you, along with your mother, & being left to grow up in a dirty noisy city like industrial Birmingham. You can imagine why the 'Machine' took on such a horrific aspect for Tolkien. And yet, the Shire has become a 'fantasy land' for most of us, & we think of it as a place to escape to - if only in our minds, for a short time. Strange to think that not much more than a century ago real people really lived that way.