The Hedge

[Lalwendë]

The residents of Buckland unfortunately remind me of my weirdo neighbour who likes to put up high fences and has a paranoia complex that people are 'looking at him' or 'listening to him' or somesuch. Maybe he doesn't like it if people see his wife sunbathing in her hotpants? You'd want to scrub your eyes clean with the nail brush, so that's not a possibility. I don't know, but the neighbour dispute the Hobbits have with their neighbours in the Old Forest gives me chills of recognition.

I mean, look at the size of the thing. If it was in the UK it would come under the High Hedges Act and they'd have the local council on their backs to get the thing cut down:

on that side they had built a hedge: the High Hay. It had been planted many generations ago, and was now thick and tall, for it was constantly tended. It ran all the way from Brandywine Bridge, in a big loop curving away from the river, to Haysend

Listen to Merry's paranoia:

the Forest is queer. Everything in it is very much alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire. And the trees do not like strangers. They watch you. They are usually content merely to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don't do much. Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer. But at night things can be most alarming, or so I am told. I have only once or twice been in here after dark, and then only near the hedge. I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them in. In fact long ago they attacked the Hedge: they came and planted themselves right by it, and leaned over it

That's just like my neighbour who thinks I'm suspicious and foreign because not only did I not grow up on that street but I come from Across The Hills.

Finally, look at the damning evicence against the Hobbits. They're yobs! Neighbours From H*ll! When are they going to get an ASBO? Or better yet, be dragged through the mud on a lurid ITV Shockumentary?

But the hobbits came and cut down hundreds of trees, and made a great bonfire in the Forest, and burned all the ground in a long strip east of the Hedge. After that the trees gave up the attack, but they became very unfriendly. There is still a wide bare space not far inside where the bonfire was made.

I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd left a load of beer cans and hurled their pipeweed-arette ends over the hedge too. They were probably riding their mini-motos round there at all hours of the night too. Get orf my land indeed. No wonder the trees were 'unfriendly'. Understatement of the century, I'd have had the Hobbits slapped with an ASBO if I was the Old Forest.