A Visit to the Battle of Bywater Stone in S.R. 1460

Often times, a painting can be about more than one thing and I hope you will be interested in getting to see this rarely-glimpsed place in the Shire. This is the stone the hobbits erect on a hillside and build a garden around to commemorate the 19 fallen hobbits of the Battle of Bywater which occurred during 'The Scouring of the Shire' in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Return of the King.

The year is 1460, and an 80-year-old Sam Gamgee is seen in the background, tending the grounds in loving memory of neighbors who gave their lives to rescue his homeland from Sharkey and the ruffians. Bilbo and Frodo are present, too, in a way, in the pair of cypress trees Sam has planted - an echo of the dooryard topiaries the Bagginses cultivated in the garden of Bag End.

In the foreground, we have a young hobbit couple in their 40s. They are, in fact, the same two hobbits we glimpsed as little children atop a weed-grown mound, witnessing the rescue of Lobelia from the Lockholes in S.R. 1419. The lad and lass have grown up and married, and have not forgotten the events which they saw as little ones.

A second Shire landmark is seen in the far distance across the Great East Road: the Three Farthing Stone where three of the farthings meet, and which some scholars believe was inspired by the Four Shire Stone near Oxford.

So, on the one hand, this is a painting of Shire landscape, with important places you might see if you were there, and it is a painting of the continuation of life in the Shire in the Fourth Age of Men. It's a chance to see Sam still doing what he loves: gardening! And an opportunity to show that the little hobbit children remembered the events that shaped their childhoods.

But it is also a meditation on Tolkien and war. The presence of the red poppies may immediately suggest this to some viewers (these flowers are worn in England to commemorate Armistice Day of WWI). Though Professor Tolkien's great works were not allegorical, they do contain his very feeing heart, which had to get him through both the Great War in which he lost most of the friends of his youth, and then WWII, in which his beloved sons risked their lives. To know that such a feeling, thinking, wise man had to endure such ugliness is very hard. The poppies are mixed with the white umbellifers which have become my symbol for Edith Bratt Tolkien, who once danced among such flowers in a Yorkshire glade. Here, they bespeak all the women of her times who also went through an intolerable ordeal in the war years.

What's come of his weskit? - Miriam Ellis

It has always pulled at my own heartstrings to read about the history of England during the wars of the 20th century. Not imperial England that went around exploiting the world's poor, but the everyday folk of the countryside who lived very simple and quiet lives - the kind of people who contributed to Professor Tolkien's ideas of hobbits. To think of monstrous machines invading this humble landscape and its gardeners and farmers having to defend themselves and their families from such determined wickedness has always stirred my spirit to keenest empathy.

So, I hoped that this painting, showing the hobbits remembering battle, would point out what a terrible, ludicrous, dreadful thing war is. I will give it Sam's strongest epithet: unnatural. Big Folk may be a little taller than Little Folk, but we are all only very small beings in the grand scheme of things, and unfitted to nightmarish, pointless, and ever-passing plots of domination. I have noticed that all the world's people, with the exception of a few who have lost their reason, want hobbit-y things: home, family, nice meals to eat. We can never have enough compassion for innocent little folk who find themselves caught up in the warmongering of the power-hungry. Our proper appetites are healthier and more hobbit-like. Most of us yearn greatly for peace.

This painting is a heartfelt wreath I am laying for the dear Professor and his lost friends, and I hope you will stand with me for a few moments by the monument in this video short.