Hobbits in Kentucky (For Mandy)

Following up on a recent conversation, and on a promise made in an earlier post (Hobbitry), here is an excerpt from Davenport's essay 'Hobbitry'.Davenport (1927-2005) was a singular critic, not unlike hobbits himself, except perhaps for his practice of leaving all doors and windows open for the bugs to crawl, fly or skip on through the house. That and his diet.






Davenport recalls a conversation with Allen Barnett, a historian who retired from 30 years as head of the department at Woodbury Forest to his home in Shelbyville, Kentucky:

I began plying questions as soon as I knew that I was talking to a man who had been at Oxford as a classmate of Ronald Tolkien's. He was a history teacher, Allen Barnett. He had never read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, he was astonished and pleased to know that his friend of so many years ago had made a name for himself as a writer.
"Imagine that! You know, he used to have the most extraordinary interest in the people here in Kentucky. He could never get enough of my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to make me repeat family names like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good country names like that."
And out the window I could see tobacco barns. The charming anachronism of the hobbits' pipes suddenly made sense in a new way...



"Practically all the names of Tolkien's hobbits are listed in my Lexington phone book, and those that aren't can be found over in Shelbyville. Like as not, they grow and cure pipe-weed for a living. Talk with them, and their turns of phrase are pure hobbit: 'I hear tell,' 'right agin,' 'so Mr. Frodo is his first and second cousin, once removed either way,' 'this very month as is.' These are English locutions, of course, but ones that are heard oftener now in Kentucky than in England.

"I despaired of trying to tell Barnett what his talk of Kentucky folk became in Tolkien's imagination. I urged him to read The Lord of the Rings but as our paths have never crossed again, I don't know that he did. Nor if he knew that he created by an Oxford fire and in walks along the Cherwell and Isis the Bagginses, Boffins, Tooks, Brandybucks, Grubbs, Burrowses, Goodbodies, and Proudfoots (or Proudfeet, as a branch of the family will have it) who were, we are told, the special study of Gandalf the Grey, the only wizard who was interested in their bashful and countrified ways."

The essay can be found in the New York Times, and also included in the collection "The Geography of the Imagination," a volume of Davenport's in which he conceives of his own practice in ways that has impacted my own work greatly. His "The Anthropology of Table Manners" is wicked fun.