Extending that opportunity to engage in the appreciation of the parts of the fictional worlds someone happens to engage in seems a valuable enterprise.
Even if they’re fascinated by varieties of tobacco or weed.
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… daddy needs a new hat
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I’m not quite sure if that’s intended to be agreeing with what I wrote or making a different point, but I’m happy enough to…agree?
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Or introduces the protection racket. Nice Shire. It would be a shame if something happened to it…
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In the book the Shire gets taken over by thugs because Aragorn and the other rangers stop protecting it for free to go save the world instead.
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The plight of most elves remind me of what the runaway Asgardian who stayed on earth for hundreds of years said in Agents of Shield.
“I was a mason. I broke rocks… for thousands of years. If you can imagine that. So when they came, asking for people to fight, yes, of course, I signed up. I think, really, I just wanted to travel.”
ELLIOT RANDOLPH
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He doesn’t need to do the protection racket. The Shire is part of the (former and future) Kingdom of Arnor, so he automatically owns all of it. It’s good to be the king!
Although, speaking of protection rackets, why were the Rangers protecting the Shire? Eventually Gandalf did ask Strider to keep an extra watch, when he had misgivings about Bilbo’s ring, but they’d been doing a regular watch for a very long time. It gave the Shire some plot armor, and it was a good setup for when the Rangers were gone and the Shire had to deal with Sharky’s men themselves, but what was in it for the Rangers?
They had enough trouble just surviving, unable to increase their numbers over centuries, and the only way they could visit the Shire was probably sneaking through at night. They didn’t get any respect, even in Bree, where people knew a bit more about the outside world.
In all that time, did no one think, “You know what? Fuck the Hobbits! Let’s pull back to an area we can defend, put up fortifications, plant crops, gather herds, open mines, and increase our numbers! Let’s build a kingdom now, rather than being caretakers for what was.” 
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Especially the Marxist ones!
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We can’t even explain the real world. One of the problems we’ve got in politics and society is that people prefer resonant narratives about things rather than worked through explanations.
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I’m envisioning a right wing horror franchise: hordes of zombie Marxist economists, stumbling inexorably towards Wall Street, moaning “seeeeeeiiize the meeeeaaaans of produuuuuuuuuuuuction….”
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I realize I did a really poor job in my post. I intended to defend Tolkien here. Part of the fun of reading his books is he actually considered this sort of thing. I consider the fact we can credibly deconstruct the hobbit economy as a semi-feudal landed gentry agriarian economy through his writing to be a plus, not a negative.
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Batman is the word. Not a superhero, but an officer’s servant. It was actually considered a fairly cushy job, with nice benefits. But yes, the whole “upper class guy muddling on through,” being superior to actual trained professionals is a VERY traditional British meme.
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I am reminded of the Vichy French government replacing the motto “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”
Travail, famille, patrie - Wikipedia
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Glad you enjoyed. Makes me feel old that I remember reading that on the internet over twenty years ago.
That was just the mithril-coat. I’m sure Sting could get a good price too. And the Bidding War of the Ring would be epic!
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To protect the pipe weed trade! /humor off. See aforeposted commentary by Chomsky and Howard Zinn.
The hostile takeover of the Bank of Smaug must have caused problems across Middle Earth. Let alone thefts from cave dwellers.
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Hm. Sting did put out that one album where he plays the lute, so being in Middle Earth tracks, but I hadn’t envisioned him as a mithril broker.
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In my head I always visualized them with backpacks full of Clif Bars.
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I always envisioned lembas as a kind of vegan granola version of pemmican, probably with a little bit of weed mixed in since everyone seems so happy to eat it. It definitely seemed like the kind of thing you might buy from a guy named Tom Bombadil in a parking lot at a Dead show.
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