The Shire

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Legend has it that JRR Tolkien scratched down these words while visiting a pub in Doolin, Ireland. Having spent considerable time rambling over and about the challenging, craggy, windswept turf of the Ireland’s West Coast, the opening line just popped into his head. Another pub in another town, The Roadside Tavern in Lisdoonvarna, claims the inspiration happened there.

These wee Irish towns are always making their boasts. Doolin claims to be the Irish Music capital of the world. Lisdoonvarna has to its credit a famous Pub tune that every session player on the planet knows, or should know, entitled: The Road to Lisdoonvarna. Each claim to be the inspiration for Tolkien. I give them both a point. However, it is interesting to note that just outside of Lisdoonvarna, there is an ancient, water cave amongst the weathered clefts and scrambling woods known as Pol na Gollum (Hole of Gollum). Gollum can be translated either as dove or pigeon. If you think about a pigeon cooing in a watery cave, the spine-chilling voice of Gollum makes enormous sense. And there you have it my precious….

At any rate, whatever or wherever the source of inspiration, let’s return to the charming, opening few lines: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)
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Yesterday we visited the Shire, or Hobbiton, the movie set for the wildly successful Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It is a real village that was built for the original movie. After the success of the first three movies, the Shire went into disrepair. But with the making of the prequels, they restored the village and now it has become quite the tourist attraction. It is so authentic that it takes five full time gardeners just to keep the vegetable and flower gardens watered and tended.

The topography of the Alexander farm, some 1200 acres wherein the Shire rests, is nearly indescribable in its beauty – but I’ll try. In every direction it looked as though giant hands had been at play – clawing the ground then patting and smoothing it. The hills and valleys are boundless, one after another and covered in a lush, exemplar of green – the reason the word green was invented, the mother of all greens. Ornamenting and contrasting that, thousands of white pinpricks – the sheep of the shire.

There is a beauty which hurts, which creates longing, which you miss the moment you turn your head and stumble back to the “real” world. The Edenic memory lingers. It was once this beautiful, this wild this welcoming, this peaceful, this giving, this rhythmic – all and everywhere – the dance of first light and creation. Fractures of our past and future home linger in the plush hills of Matamata in the Waikato Region of New Zealand’s North Isle.