Is the middle earth of LOTR the Bluegrass region of Kentucky?

[alfredo]

Here is the story in the Lexington Herald Leader that has some revelations about the people of middle earth.


http://www.kentucky.com/mld/heraldleader/news/opinion/7568588.htm

While Kentuckians -- like everyone else in the English-speaking world -- have renewed their acquaintance with The Lord of the Rings through the films of Peter Jackson, many do not know the Kentucky connection in the J.R.R. Tolkien saga.


The beginnings of Middle Earth, as many people now know, can be traced to an inscription in Tolkien's handwriting on the back of a student's paper, which read, "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit." At the time he scribbled these words, his imagination was just beginning to figure out exactly what a hobbit was. And, as it turns out, the Bluegrass region of Kentucky was to have something to do with what hobbits were eventually to become in the mind of the Oxford professor -- and on the pages of the book he was to write about it.


In Geography of the Imagination, Kentucky writer Guy Davenport recounts a conversation he had one snowy day with Allen Barnett, a Shelbyville history teacher who had once been a classmate of Tolkien's at Oxford. Barnett had not read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings,but was glad to hear that his old classmate had made a name for himself.

[TacticalPeek]

1. "Like as not, they cure pipe-weed for a living."

:smoke:

[alfredo]

2. In suburban basements everywhere

Now that moonshine is out, and the coal either automated or out west, pipe weed has become a cash crop in the mountains east of the bluegrass.

I always thought he was referring to the English countryside, but then there are similarities between the British isles and the bluegrass region.

[chocolateeater]

3. The Bluegrass is the Shire.

Very cool. B-)

[DS1]

4. fat chance

It's England.

[alfredo]

5. did you read the article?

He makes a good case.