Memory

[wallace_trust]

There are many things about LOtR that capture me.  Among all of its meanings, the story is very much a celebration, and a mourning of, a  timeless rural life that was being steadily destroyed by industrialization and the market economy even as Tolkien wrote his book.  I was raised in the country and I knew that life as a child, and while it had its drawbacks-- as today's cynics are so quick to point out-- it was a very sweet life.  But during my teens, the familiar woods where I had always ridden my horse were almost all mowed down to make way for huge crowded tracts of cheap ugly housing, and the land changed quickly around me in ways that the human psyche never evolved to handle.  It felt like the "Scouring of the Shire," except that there was no "scouring--" there was no stopping the development, and year after year I witnessed in a kind of dreaming horror all the little fields and woodlands that I knew, succumbing forever, one by one, to pavement and noise and ugliness.  

LOtR acknowledges this inevitable transformation, but also it preserves a true taste of that rural sweetness which so many millions of people will sadly now never experience in waking life.