It's 1984 in the Third Age

[Wayland]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

How does The Shire begin to fall? With the hand of 'venture capitalism', as exercised by Lotho's family, buying up supplies and property to artificially inflate demand and thus prices - it's a common business practice, legal but greedy. You can see a similar thing today when people started buying up property in order to sell at a later date for profit - the result is that they have lots of money and capital but a lot of other people are now priced out of the housing market.

The Shire became destabilised by the Sackville-Bagginses efforts (as it would in the real world which is why we have anti-monopoly regulations) and of course his not-so benevolent 'business partner' Saruman steps in.

Hi Lalwendë,
What a good thread. A similar thought came to my mind as I read the Lotr.

The humble Hobbits, I mused, may be non other than the good-hearted yeomanry of the English Shires, forced by brute economics from their land and into the dark mills and squalid housing of the Industrial Revolution.

Our little fellowship, in their journey, took a road back through time and encountered the twin streams of their powerful ancestry - the vital, warrior-like Riders of Rohan (Anglo-Saxons) and the mighty heirs of Numenor (Classical Civilisation and the knowledge it brought from across the sea).

They grew as individuals and returned to liberate the Shire from the nightmare which had enveloped it.

Perhaps what Tolkein would have liked to have seen?

Then again, I may be reading too much into it.