I grew up in Shelton, Connecticut; a small, rural town straddling the Housatonic River. It was a land of forests, rolling hills, and quiet rivers. Thus, imagining J.R.R. Tolkien's Shire was never very hard for me. I often felt as though I lived in it.
Being on the East Coast, there was a lovely sense of history to Shelton; though it pales in comparison with that of Tolkien's England. Main Street was still dominated by the shells of the old mills and the J.P. Morgan Restaurant; from a time when the great robber-baron himself had high hopes for the town. The Plumb Memorial Library still sported its quaint Victorian exterior, my friend lived in a 200 year old converted farm-house, many of the churches were at least that old, and crisscrossing the woods were miles and miles of stone walls, stone foundations, and little old cemeteries.
Quaint. Charming. But I never thought then what all this beauty meant. Shelton is part of a dying civilization. You can tell from the size of the trees, all thin and slender, the growth of the last fifty years. Two hundred years ago, they were mostly felled to make room for the bustling farms and homesteads that all those walls marked out. These were the days when Connecticut was part of the largest concentration of America's population: the Industrial North. It was Connecticut arms, forged by the great American gun companies, placed in the hands of men from New York, Ohio, and Massachusetts, that crushed the under-populated South and put an end to the "War Between the States." The rotting hulk of the great Colt Arms Factory can still be seen on the Hartford skyline, like the dome of Osgiliath. Now, thanks to AC, people are pouring in to Charlotte while each census quietly removes another house seat from the armory of her conquerors. But it is more than that. The families I knew growing up add to the tale. How many of them boasted two children, or only one? We were part of a rather conservative circle where three was thought average, but five was unnervingly large. Like old Europe, New England is slowly dying out.
This is one reason that Tolkien's works speak so powerfully to me: they are haunted with a sense of loss and decline. The old stone work of Minas Tirith is better than the new. Many houses in the White City stand empty. Beregond reflects that there were always too few children in the city. The realm of Arnor is lost. Eriador is depopulated. There are no more entings. Even the long life granted Aragorn is paltry in comparison to that of his longfathers. With the exception of Rohan and the Shire, everywhere we turn in Tolkien's world we see that the civilizations are not as great as those that preceded them. For a Yankee, at least, that rings true.
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