Comment by Earw0rm
19 hours ago
Accurate.
This romanticist nonsense also means that adequately lit and drained paths - for walking, cycling and wheeling at all hours - inevitably attract rural NIMBY ire.
"Preserve the character of our rural village with its 5000 SUVs and its manor house built by plantation owners".
Presumably someone's done a Tolkien fanfic where it turns out the hobbits have a bunch of plantations in Numenor or somewhere populated by enslaved Uruks, and the twee-ness is a front for general assholeness and moral hypocrisy?
I did always wonder about the general standard of living in the Shire - always seemed suspiciously high to me.
Decent amount of manufactured goods, always enough food, no sign of a serf labouring class or any manufacturing to speak of.
It's 18th(ish) century rural England, without all the stuff that made 18th century rural England a relatively comfortable place, which is to say colonies, the slave trade, the early industrial revolution and so on.
Because it's attempting mythisimilitude, not verisimilitude.
That’s amusing. Not anywhere near the same but The Last Ringbearer has Mordor as an industrializing society unfairly maligned.