Nostalgia For The Shire

When we first see the Shire we don't think much of it, and it may be that Tolkien didn't either, not at first. The people are petty and Bilbo's desire for adventure seems to have much to do with getting out of his current life and into a more interesting one. This persists through the first chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring as well, though we begin to see the change. When Bilbo becomes dissatisfied with life, he wants to get out, he knows probably permanently. He does show some twinges of things he will miss - and he is pleased to get news of it from the hobbits when they come to Rivendell - but when it is his time to go to the Grey Havens he does not make a final detour to see his old haunts.* 

So until Frodo is expressing reluctance to leave, we don't have any Shire Nostalgia ourselves. We see them as knuckleheads and want to just get out, like Bilbo.  We understand Frodo feeling attached to the place he grew up and has loved for decades, but we feel a bit impatient. By the end of LOTR we have forgotten this, and on subsequent readings we share Frodo's reluctance, but this is based on what we know from later information, when Frodo and Sam are aching for any scrap of the Shire while they are in Mordor. When people are away things look different in the rear view mirror.  They change. 

When those who go away return, they change the place. While they most obviously change it by bringing back ideas and technology (and spouses) from the war, or the trading ports, or the country they went to work in for a time, they also bring back their changed impressions of the old place. The selective forgetting of memory means they keep what they consider the essential parts - and likely modify those - and drop the ones they don't like.  Many soldiers returning from a war, often all at once, can have a profound effect on a place.  It changes for ever. Though even when it is only a few, if they are influential figures as the hobbits were they change the Shire. They remembered it a certain way, and knew what they thought was the essence of it. When they return to destruction and "set things to rights," that is not quite what they left.

 

Also, there is another type of "leaving and returning" in LOTR: the entry into Faerie. If you have read "Smith of Wooten Major" or know the Tam Lin legend/song, you see the leaving of this world to go to one wholly other, that plays by different rules, Faerie.  These are places where they don't just eat different foods or have different cultures, they have different digestions and different cultures.  Time flows differently there. In LOTR these would be  Old Forest and Bombadil; Rivendell and Lothlorien, the elves in their central home places; the Entwood, Fangorn. In contrast Bree is an adventure only for its events, not any abiding strangeness that changes one. The same is true for Weathertop, Rohan, Orthanc, and Gondor.  Even Moria is not quite Faerie, though its subterranean horror my be leaking Faerie out into it. Cirith Ungol? I...don't...think so, though Ungoliant is from even a greater time depth than Sauron. The paths of the dead and the ghastly dead marshes may have the same sense of difference in some ways. They are not so different from the Barrows. I don't think those qualify as Faerie, though I agree it is not quite clear.The Deeap marshes and the paths of the dead...I don't know.

In the Hobbit,there is much less of this start to finish.  Tolkien placed that story in a sort of Faerie to begin with, and only later, as he developed the tale, did he separate Middle Earth into some places that we recognise as like our own, though far remote, and places that are simply Other, though the two have interacted over the years. The forest of Mirkwood comes closest to being Deep Faerie, and Beorn as a supremely natural, more than a preternatural creature may still qualify. One could argue that is true of many residents of Faerie, I suppose.

To enter Faerie and emerge is to be changed.

*I just notice that double meaning and its roots in the context of my own Nostalgia Destruction Tour. Yes, I am likely haunted and always will be, more like Frodo than Bilbo.