I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
Tolkien's Middle-earth is often described as a realm of elves and wizards, of ancient kings and trembling orcs. Yet the story that has settled most firmly into the hearts of readers across the world is not really about the great among us. It is about the small folk, the ones who till the soil, who tend the gardens, who keep the kitchen warm. The hobbits of the Shire are farmers, bakers, and innkeepers long before they are heroes, and the peculiar courage they show when the shadow falls is the kind of bravery most people never see written about in song.
In Australia, that archetype lands with particular weight. The cultural reverence for the bush, for the stoic resilience of people who work the land through drought and flood, runs deep in the national imagination. Walk through a country town in western Victoria during the wheat harvest, or chat with apple growers in the Huon Valley about a bad season, and you will hear a vocabulary of endurance that has very little in common with the language of epic. Tolkien understood that kind of voice, and he placed it at the centre of his mythology.
Australian readers have long returned the favour. Bookshops in Carlton and Newtown and Fremantle keep his titles in stock year after year, and the shelves of regional lending libraries in places like Castlemaine and Bellingen rarely lack for a battered copy of The Return of the King. There is a particular kind of Australian book lover, often found browsing the market stalls of the Bendigo Writers Festival or queueing for a panel at the Wheeler Centre, who reads Tolkien not for the battles but for the quiet threads of devotion running through the work.
This article is for those readers, and for anyone who has ever wondered what it is about a gardener with a sword, or a farmer taking up a bow, that makes the heart lift. There is a strange courage at work in the Shire, and it speaks directly to the values Australians often claim for their own rural communities: a refusal to flinch, a loyalty to the patch of ground you know, and a willingness to walk into the dark when the dark comes for you.
Tolkien's Shire is a place of measured seasons, of well-kept hedges and pumpkin fields, of ale-drinking in the sun. It is built to feel like a long-inhabited country village where nothing much ever happens and nobody wants it to. The hobbits measure their years in harvests, not in coronations, and the highest office in the land, the Mayor of Michel Delving, is largely a ceremonial post. The Shire is, in essence, a deeply agrarian society, and Tolkien writes it with the affection of a man who missed the English countryside while living in industrial Birmingham and later in academic Oxford.
That quiet world, however, is not naïve. Tolkien knew, as any Australian farmer knows, that peace is not the same as safety. A standing crop can be flattened by hail in twenty minutes. A dam can crack. A fire can take a homestead in an afternoon. The Shire has its own watch and its own constables, and the borders are patrolled, even if the patrols are mostly concerned with stray cattle and the occasional goblin. The peace is real, but it is a peace that is tended, and it is tended by people who understand that peace requires work.
What Tolkien builds, then, is a pastoral ideal that is also a working landscape. The hobbits are not children playing at being rural; they are rural in their bones, with the muscle memory of people who have done the labour for generations. When the shadow comes, the reader already knows that these are hands that can swing a scythe, lift a sack, and yes, given reason, draw a bow.
Of all the hobbits who walk out of the Shire, Samwise Gamgee is the one who carries the pastoral world on his back. He is, before anything else, a gardener. He thinks in terms of seasons and growth, of seeds that need planting and weeds that need pulling. His master, Frodo, is the quest-bearer, the figure of fate; Sam is the one who keeps the journey human. He is the companion who remembers that there is a kitchen garden back home, that the gaffer will worry, that potatoes need to be earthed up at the right time.
His courage is therefore of a very specific kind. It is not the courage of the warrior, although he learns to fight. It is the courage of the person who refuses to let the people he loves go hungry, who cooks a meal over a fire in a ruin, who reminds Frodo that there is still a world worth returning to. When he carries the Ring briefly himself, what saves him is not any heroic virtue but the plain recognition that there is no gardening in Mordor, and that this must therefore be stopped. Sam is brave because he is rooted.
Australian readers often recognise something of their own uncles and grandfathers in him. The farmers of the Mallee, the graziers of the northern tablelands, the orchardists of the Goulburn Valley, all tend to speak of their work in terms of care rather than conquest. They are managing a living system, and they know that the system can fail. That knowledge, the quiet understanding that things can go wrong and that you have to be ready when they do, is the soil from which Sam's courage grows.
The most extraordinary passage in The Lord of the Rings, for many readers, is the Scouring of the Shire. Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return home to find their country in chains, worked by ruffians, its trees felled, its inns turned into barracks. The hobbits who remained have been bullied and broken. The four travellers, with a small band of friends, must now drive the occupiers out. It is, in miniature, a liberation, and it is carried out not by a great army but by a few dozen farmers with whatever weapons they can lay hands on.
This moment matters because it completes the arc. The Shire could not remain forever a place of untouched peace; Tolkien had fought in the Somme, and he knew that no village is finally exempt from the wider world. But the defence of the Shire is not a defeatist parable. It is a quiet manifesto. The people who do the freeing are the people who belong to the place. They know every lane, every bridge, every hedgerow. Their local knowledge becomes their tactical advantage, and their personal stake in the land becomes their reason to fight.
For Australian audiences, the Scouring has a particular resonance. The Anzac tradition, with its emphasis on the citizen soldier, on the miner or the clerk or the shearer who picked up a rifle and went to Gallipoli or Tobruk, is built on a similar premise. The country that those soldiers came back to was rural, in many cases, and the men who fought for it were often the same men who worked it. Tolkien's Shire is, in a small way, the same kind of place, and the hobbits who rise up in its defence are cousins to the diggers who came home and quietly went back to the wheat.
It is impossible to separate the Shire from the man who wrote it. Tolkien served in the Lancashire Fusiliers from 1916, and most of his close school friends were killed in the war. The Shire is, among other things, a dream of what was being lost: a green and orderly England of lanes and inns that the trenches had already begun to unmake. The pastoral world of the hobbits is not escapism; it is a memory held against the dark, and a sketch of what the returning soldier hoped to find.
This is where Tolkien's writing speaks to readers in a country like Australia, where the loss of the First World War is inscribed on the walls of every small-town RSL. The memorials in places like Villers-Bretonneux and Pozieres carry the names of shearers and shop assistants, and the country they came from was, then as now, in many ways a country of the soil. The Shire, for Australian readers, is not some remote English fantasy. It is a version of a world that their own grandfathers fought to defend, and the courage of its farmers is the courage of the people whose names are on the local war memorial.
Tolkien began, late in life, a sequel set in the Fourth Age of Middle-earth, a time when the Shire had been restored and the great kingdoms had passed. The new enemy in Tolkien's Unfinished Sequel: The New Shadow and Its Themes was not a Dark Lord but a kind of cult of cynicism, a corruption of the very peace the hobbits had won. Tolkien abandoned the project, saying that the subject was too close to his own experience of industrial encroachment and political hatred to be bearable.
What survives of the draft suggests that he wanted to ask what happens to a society of farmers once the great war is over. Do they remember what they fought for? Do their children grow soft? Can a peaceful people lose the capacity for the strange courage that saved them once? The fragment is haunting precisely because it leaves these questions open, and because Tolkien himself could not find a hopeful answer.
None of the hobbits could have done what they did alone. Frodo needs Sam, and Sam needs Frodo, and both of them need the wider fellowship of the walk. The bonds between these characters are not grand or romantic; they are the bonds of people who have shared a kitchen, a path, a night of cold. The courage of farmers in Tolkien's world is always, at heart, a collective courage, and it is sustained by the small daily acts of looking after one another.
The literature of friendship, especially the kind that grows between people who share work and weather, has a long and varied history. There is a thoughtful roundup of contemporary novels about female friendship that traces the same terrain from a different angle, looking at how women in particular sustain one another through years of ordinary endurance. Reading it alongside Tolkien is a rewarding exercise, because both traditions insist that the deepest heroism is often hidden in the long, unrecorded afternoons of looking after the people beside you.
The strange courage of farmers in the shadow of war is, finally, the courage of belonging. It is the willingness to stand up for a particular place, with its particular trees, its particular people, its particular way of doing things. Tolkien understood that this kind of courage is rarely glamorous and almost never victorious in the way that epic poetry likes. It is, instead, the daily courage of staying, of mending, of refusing to be moved.
Australian readers, surrounded by the steady presence of rural communities that have weathered fire and drought and the slow withdrawal of services from country towns, recognise this quiet heroism without needing it explained. It is part of the local vocabulary, the same vocabulary that fills the pages of Australian literary journals and the quiet essays of writers who grew up on properties and never quite left the land behind. The Shire, in the end, is a mirror held up to any community that knows the weight of a long horizon and the value of a neighbour who turns up when things are bad.
That mirror is why the books still sell, in suburban newsagencies and country town op-shops alike, and why readers keep returning to the Shire even when they know the ending. They go back for the farmers, and for the strange, unlooked-for courage that grows, like everything else worth having, out of good soil.
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading