Hobbits and the Shire: The strength of the hills is theirs also.

Yesterday, a friend sent me something he was working on about The Lord of the Rings, and what he had to say about Hobbits and the Shire in it immediately made me think of the passage I have quoted below. I couldn't remember where I had read these comments before, though. I was pretty sure it wasn't in anything Tolkien wrote, and I thought it was in Lewis. As it turned out, I was right. It just took me a while to track it down. So to prevent me from forgetting the location of the comments again, I am sharing it with all of you.

The allusion to the 95th psalm in the penultimate sentence just makes me think of Tom Bombadil himself as well as old Tom's assessment of Farmer Maggot: ‘There’s earth under his old feet, and clay on his fingers; wisdom in his bones, and both his eyes are open' (FR 1.vii.132). Remember, too, that the Shire has a power of its own (FR 2.i.222) and it was in the Shire (faced with the redoubtable Gaffer and Farmer Maggot) that 'the hunters before whom all have fled or fallen' faltered (FR 2.ii.260. And am I the only one who hears an echo of T. S. Eliot in 'We are synthetic men, uprooted'?

Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood-they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours. My pen has run away with me on this subject.

C. S. Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greaves, 22 June 1930