Jamin Bradley

Happy Hobbit Day!

Sometimes I feel a bit like a Hobbit when I recount my journey throughout Michigan. I grew up in the Shire—a small village with little diversity. My experience there had been similar to Tolkien’s description:

“The Hobbits named it the Shire… and there in that pleasant corner of the world they plied their well-ordered business of living, and they heeded less and less the world outside where dark things moved, until they came to think that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of all sensible folk… They were, in fact, sheltered, but they had ceased to remember it.”

When middle school came around, we moved into the suburbs, where I found myself amidst people of various races and ethnicities. It was there that my elementary social studies classes began to take on the legs of experience. Life was not as homogenous, simple, or easy as I once thought it was. Different people had different hardships and struggles. Life was no longer equally pleasant, well-ordered, and full of peace and plenty—at least not for everyone.

This revelation grew even more when I moved back to the Shire sometime later, before leaving for the wider parts of Middle-earth again. And to that extent, the Shire helped to create the social-justice-oriented person I am today, as it doubly gave me the space to compare and contrast and to see what I could not see before.

Bilbo was right: “It’s a dangerous business… going out of your door.” But in my experience, the danger lies in the revelation that lies outside our hobbit holes, for we struggle to fit in with the Shirefolk after we’ve seen what we’ve seen.