This is a wonderful article about J.R.R. Tolkien that reveals some things you might not know. For example, I didn’t know that the Shire was “more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of [Queen Victoria’s] Diamond Jubilee” and later swallowed up by Birmingham.
I want to live in the shire. If such a place exists. It did, I think, in my childhood.
That longing to be locavores, put our hands in the earth, hear the birds, pick wild mushrooms, sit by the pond, and drink from the well of joy, is latent in many of us. The pastoral is peaceful and powerful.
