[Child of the 7th Age]

Fascinating stuff, Bêthberry. I heartily concur with your view that there are no invalid or wrong responses here. We're not talking about a life and death struggle or "good versus evil" but merely considering how people view the world through different prisms of belief and experience and the fact that these prisms invariably shape their response to artistic creations, whether we're discussing houses or poetry.

When I casually put up that link, I was thinking it might be pleasant to wile away a few hours inside the library of that house. I do find the place pleasant enough for that purpose. Yet my initial thoughts were really no deeper than that. I wasn't considering purchasing the property nor was I putting forward a carefully thought out statement of what my "ideal" hobbit hole would be. Still, the latter is worthy of consideration. I found one of the questions you raised especially intriguing in this regard:

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

While it's possible to consider this question in a much wider sense, I'll restrict myself to the vexing issue of hobbit holes that seems to have captured this particular thread.

My "ideal" hobbit hole would indeed reflect many personal elements of "class and culture". Let me explain. I first read LotR in the sixties when I was a student at university. My whole response to the book was very influenced by the fact that I saw myself as a counter culture person. (I certainly wasn't unique in that respect.) I was deeply involved in the ecology movement along with my friends; many of us were living in communes....wearing long peasant skirts, baking bread, and rejecting at least certain aspects of our upbringing. (Yeah, I was one of those crazy American kids whom Tolkien found good hearted but definitely misguided.) To this day, those views shape my image of middle-earth, at least on an emotional level.

For that reason, the hobbits I envision are invariably connected with the earth. A hobbit should have his feet planted in the soil, and his house should reflect that.....never mind that Tolkien said only a minority of hobbits lived in burrows by the latter part of the Third Age.

Given my working class roots, I think I would find even Bag-end a bit too uppity. The place has to be fairly small and cluttered if I'm going to feel safe and comfortable. Plus, I would probably throw in a pinch of left-leaning politics and political correctness. Voila.....I get a burrow that looks something like this: house in Pembroke.

This particular family has built its hobbit home almost completely out of natural materials. The walls are made of stone and mud, water enters the house by gravity from a nearby spring and any non-natural things like windows and plumbing were picked up in rubbish piles. I'm not going to tell you I live like that in real life, but that is the way my heart would lean.

It's quite clear that my hobbits and hobbit holes are not identical with Tolkien's . I have little contact with farming or farmers, which is certainly part of what he put into his hobbits, probably a reflection of certain aspects of his childhood. And though I enjoy Tolkien's Edwardian overlay on the Shire, that is personally "foreign" to me.

So yes, you're right. What I bring to the story has an enormous impact on how I perceive the characters and even how I would build a hobbit hole, if I ever got around to constructing one.