Utopian Shire

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

It is a beauty which has not always been associated with the Sublime, another aesthetic quality, which at least in the 18C was regarded as a quality of the kind of environment Laur speaks of, Mount Blanc in the Swiss Alps (which I read as her Alaskan wilderness, neither of which is a man-made environment (except as the oil and gas conglomerates and animal-hunting-by-airplane-advocates have their impact). This is a very different kind of beauty, one not associated with human sub-creation. It is a kind of landscape which often, in my reading of the historical expansion of North America, developes an adversarial relationship between humans and nature--and it is this very adversarial aspect which stimulates such tourist and sports development as heli-skiing and mountain climbing and championship snowmobiling races.

Although the Romantics in the UK certainly found plenty of the Sublime in the English landscape - take Wordsworth as just one example. Though to be fair, they probably were unaware of just how delicate a balance between farming and nature had formed the Lakeland Fells and assumed 'God' had just done it all!

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

Although the Romantics in the UK certainly found plenty of the Sublime in the English landscape - take Wordsworth as just one example. Though to be fair, they probably were unaware of just how delicate a balance between farming and nature had formed the Lakeland Fells and assumed 'God' had just done it all!

And what a difference comparing Wordsworth's placid vistas of the Lake District to Dickens' nightmarish vision of sooty and abysmal London.

[Lindale]

No offense to Wordsworth or any of the Romantics or anybody else, but I agree with Rumil and his "gentlehobbit" view of Frodo, Bilbo, Pippin and Merry. If you really look at it with even just the slightest Marxist eye, the ones who do talk in Tolkien's works are the high-born, whatever your term for them, with very few exceptions like Sam (who ended up as Mayor of the Shire anyway) and Voronwe (who was of the Noldor, but not exactly the nobility in the same way Gwindor was).

During one of my classes in English literature someone (not your poor little Lindale!) asked if any of the Romantics of England did experience what we may consider poverty. Did Wordsworth or Coleridge or any other of their sort work with their hands? The Romanticism in England, after all, did spring, from among others, a sort of dissent in the Industrial Revolution. And they're Romantics. They were young, geniuses in their own right, but they were young.

Somehow I can argue that only those from the middle class up can be Romantics; you never (or at least, you almost never do, or Aristotle never did see) find the working class happily philosophizing while working or about their work. And among the conservative middle class, which exists in some societies still, like mine, those who have a bit of the Romantics lose it or at least manage to repress it before the "real world" sinks in. Or, after college or a few years after college.

Marx was Marx because he lived in his own time and space and society. So were the Romantics, and Tolkien.