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Silvered-glass
Lorien
Apr 25, 8:55am
Post #26 of 61
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Hobbits are generally thought to be a sub-type of Men, but I think a strong argument could be made that hobbits instead descend from the mysterious Avari Elves, of whom so little is known, though their love of their home regions and lack of desire to go on grand adventures would certainly be considered hobbitish traits.
Hobbits with their preternatural stealth abilities and remarkably sharp senses (Bilbo for example can spot the waxing crescent on the sky earlier than a human could) do not quite fit the category of "humans except short". Beyond the height, hobbits according to Tolkien have pointed "Elvish" ears and the hobbits' distinctive characteristic of furry feet are well known (and according to Tolkien are really furry legs, not just feet). In more circumstantial detail, the hobbits' fondness for trees, nature in general, and underground dwellings is reminiscent of Elves. Hobbits are naturally nimble and good at ranged attacks from childhood, and a very significant but often overlooked detail is the stature of the hobbits reportedly growing gradually shorter as generations pass. This suggests that hobbits are subject to the fading of the Elves, which would make no sense unless hobbits are deep down really a type of Elf.
The main piece of evidence, and a very strong one, in favor of hobbits being Men is the mortality of the hobbits. To support this might perhaps be added individual feelings about the hobbits being too "ordinary" to be related to Elves. Yet we must remember that hobbits look ordinary through the eyes of hobbits. A non-hobbit POV character could well have seen a number of alien details that the hobbit narrators ignored as ordinary and not worth mentioning.
As for the critical issue of mortality, this could be solved simply with the hobbits having a small amount of human blood from distant past, even one drop being enough to transfer mortality on all descendants. However there is also another, more obscure explanation that may have been what Tolkien really intended but, like many details in the backstory, wasn't really conveyed in the works published during Tolkien's lifetime.
Going to The Book of Lost Tales, where we can infer that mortality is not the real Gift of Men (unforeseeable free will is), but rather mortality was inflicted on Middle-earth by Fui Nienna, the other Vala of death. I don't think Tolkien necessarily abandoned this concept even if it didn't make it to The Silmarillion. I also wonder if Gollum might be really the character Nuin from Gilfanon's Tale. The two share many similarities in character, and there are good reasons to think that Gandalf's version of Gollum's backstory isn't exactly reliable.
This is however getting far from the main subject of this thread and would be better discussed elsewhere.
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Ethel Duath
Half-elven
Apr 26, 2:34am
Post #27 of 61
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It does sound from that quote as if there was something about the Shire Lands that fit the Hobbits' sensibilities and longings like nothing they had seen before, and nowhere they had been before. 
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Ethel Duath
Half-elven
Apr 26, 2:55am
Post #28 of 61
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" . . . how did the relatively small population of medieval Vikings get all the way to modern-day Ukraine!"
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Yeah, I'm with you. Along with who were the Sumerians, really, and when are they going to finally decipher the Etruscan Language!
You're right about Gondor. I don't know if the "absence of evidence is evidence of absence," or if we're just not told.
(This post was edited by Ethel Duath on Apr 26, 2:55am)
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Roverandom
Bree
Apr 26, 4:05pm
Post #29 of 61
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We have now touched on something that has quietly ttroubled me in every reading of LotR. The Gondor chapters seem a bit rushed. Maybe it's simply a matter of suffering by comparison, as we are given a wealth of information about Rohan, its history, language, and culture. We spend so much time in Rohan that we feel we know the place like we were natives. The chapters flow at the proper pace, and characters like Theoden, Eowyn, even Wormtounge are given the opportunity to develop. The rolling meads and darkened mountain vales almost become characters in their own right. Gondor, with fewer chapters devoted to that same background, feels less of a real place, particularly as we come to the tipping point of its (and its leader, Denethor's) fall. I suspect that this is a planned effort to show us how ancient but fragile is the last, great city of Numenor, but there are times I wish the author had taken just a little more time in leading us to the brink and showed us more of why we should care about its perilous state.
On the other hand, I would argue that we do get some of what you (and the rest of us) are pining for through our time with Faramir. By all measurement, he is the Compleat Man of Gondor and, by extension, Numenor. When we look at Faramir showing his quality --- blending courage with courtesy, making hard decisions with justice, maintaining meal-time customs even in the Wild, reminding us in word and deed how a Numenorean should live and lay down his life --- I think we are meant to appreciate and better understand Gondor. In the same way, our journey with Boromir and audience with Denethor provide us a similar opportunity, albeit coming off in a less-flattering light.
So, in retrospect, I take back everything I said about Gondor being a problem. 
For just as there has always been a Richard Webster, so too has there been a Black Scout of the North to greet him at the door on the threshold of the evening and to guard him through his darkest dreams.
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GreenHillFox
Bree
Apr 26, 4:21pm
Post #30 of 61
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How hobbits experienced leaving the Shire
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I love the dense, atmospheric tone in JRRT’s description, when he came to write about the hobbits leaving the Shire.
It started with Frodo waking up to a nightmare at Crickhollow. Then the cheerless stealth by which they left the house (“Everything was still, and far-away noises seemed near and clear: fowls chattering in a yard, someone closing a door of a distant house”). The ominous fog (“the mist, which seemed to open reluctantly before them and close forbiddingly behind them”). The final move: “It shut with a clang, and the lock clicked. The sound was ominous.”
It is wonderful to read between the lines how hobbits felt like leaving a great part of themselves behind while leaving the Shire, in these few finely crafted paragraphs.
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CuriousG
Half-elven
Apr 26, 7:12pm
Post #31 of 61
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From an analytical sense, I think you answered the problem by pointing out that Faramir with Frodo in Ithilien/Henneth Annun is our stand-in for Gondor's psyche, ideals, and culture, but as a reader, I remember it made me "aesthetically angry" on my very first read that Gondor "unfairly" received more coverage than Rohan. I even kept browsing and comparing the Rohan and Gondor chapters, trying to make sure it wasn't a false impression.
Now it's all a bit blurry, and reading the appendices filled in a lot for me, especially since Gondor's history is clearly on a more epic scale than Rohan's, but that sense stills creeps up on me doing a straight re-read of LOTR.
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CuriousG
Half-elven
Apr 26, 9:11pm
Post #32 of 61
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"Well-run societies don’t need heroes"
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Today I rediscovered a blog by one of my favorite modern thinkers, Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish-American sociologist who breaks the mold on academia and bravely (and expertly) writes on many topics outside her initial field of study, weaving together ideas from multiple perspectives, including technology and dealing with COVID. She has a knack for explaining things at great length and also punching readers with concise statements like my post title here. I'm haunted by her blunt statement that "institutions only work as long as we all agree to support them," because that's not a safe assumption anymore.
Conclusion: the Shire has no heroes because it's well-run. (And also doesn't normally face external threats.)
She wrote one of the most insightful explorations of why Game of Thrones ended badly for most fans: it shifted from a sociological story to a psychology one, and fans (like me) had bought into and had been intrigued by the sociology (such as Essos-Dany fighting slavery, trying to re-shape society, and finding society shaped her. Long article here that's worth the read and had crossover with Tolkien if you're a Tolkien fan and project your values on it.
In the short-term it gives context to hobbits, culture, and heroism, but it also could make a good, separate discussion of LOTR and how it seems a hybrid of sociological and psychological stories.
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CuriousG
Half-elven
Apr 26, 9:14pm
Post #33 of 61
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Indeed! Thanks for your insights
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Especially about hobbits leaving a part of themselves behind in the Shire. I think that steeled them in some ways on their quest, knowing they were protecting their homeland, but it also made them homesick.
I tried to focus on the tonally upbeat passages depicting Shire culture, but we need to venture into darker passages too as our discussion matures and develops, so thanks for bringing that up.
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oliphaunt
Lorien
Apr 28, 4:17pm
Post #34 of 61
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Could the Shire have had a bit of assistance behind-the-scenes?
After all,There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought Was the Shire meant to be a safe haven? It did, after all, incubate an excellent Burglar and a group of heroes.
*** Middle Earth Inexpert ***
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oliphaunt
Lorien
Apr 28, 5:16pm
Post #35 of 61
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The Shire makes the Hobbits or the Hobbits make the Shire?
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As CuriousG put it: In the Shire's case, I feel like the land could have lain fallow for centuries and that would have been okay, but it had a sort of agency, I believe, and embraced the hobbits' presence when they arrived, just as they embraced it as their home in a symbiotic relationship
If the Shire was meant to be the home for Hobbits, it sure could work like this. Gandalf the Grey doesn't have any direct comments to make about this idea, but his interest in the Shire and Hobbits surely has a purpose. Gandalf the White probably knew a lot more, but wasn't one for answering questions.
*** Middle Earth Inexpert ***
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Ethel Duath
Half-elven
Apr 28, 5:44pm
Post #36 of 61
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I must have been hungry. I read that as
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". . . incubate an excellent Burger . . ." 
Anyway, about possible Outside Forces: I actually do think so, even if only indirectly. Too much hinges on Bilbo and Frodo, along with the "meant," for the existence of the Shire to be entirely off the radar of the Valar. But how much specific intervention--or not--may have occurred, it's hard to say.
*Goes off to play around with possible radar/Valar combinations* 
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oliphaunt
Lorien
Apr 28, 6:53pm
Post #37 of 61
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Perhaps a hamburglar?
*** Middle Earth Inexpert ***
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CuriousG
Half-elven
Apr 28, 7:05pm
Post #38 of 61
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The Shire was meant to...create great burgers
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AI art strikes again.
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Silvered-glass
Lorien
Apr 28, 9:45pm
Post #39 of 61
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Could the Shire have had a bit of assistance behind-the-scenes? After all, There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought Was the Shire meant to be a safe haven? It did, after all, incubate an excellent Burglar and a group of heroes.
Yes, I've also been thinking about the Shire along these lines, but I didn't make a thread on it because there is a rather bad lack of supporting evidence. I can think of a few things, but they're very arguable.
If my LotR sequel ever happens (I've been working on and revising the outline) I'm planning on having the secret of the Shire's protection included in the story.
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Ethel Duath
Half-elven
Apr 28, 10:07pm
Post #40 of 61
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Must be.
McDonalds owes the Tolkien Estate for copyright violations.
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Ethel Duath
Half-elven
Apr 28, 10:10pm
Post #41 of 61
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Kind of horrifying in a way. (Is that sign trying to be German or something?)
The prices are certainly competitive.
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CuriousG
Half-elven
Apr 28, 11:15pm
Post #42 of 61
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We're definitely in the realm of gut feelings and head canons here
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Yes, I've also been thinking about the Shire along these lines, but I didn't make a thread on it because there is a rather bad lack of supporting evidence. I can think of a few things, but they're very arguable. I agree there's no hard evidence for saying the Shire was meant to be. It just feels that way to me as a reader.
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noWizardme
Half-elven
Wed, 9:58am
Post #43 of 61
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When I imagine The Shire, land and peoeple...
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When I imagine The Shire, land and people, I'm aware that not all of it is what Tolkien has communicated explicitly. A lot of it is my inference, and my making sense of the text as best I can.
Where those inferences come from are of course:- My own experiences
- Ideas I have picked up culturally - things I have read or been told, or absorbed through the arts or media.
I imagine that's true for everyone, with resulting variations in how we imagine things?
There is much more of item (2) in recent years than there was when I first read LOTR some time in the 1970s. Tolkien Fandom existed then, but it wasn't obvious how to get connected to it, and I didn't. So -- probably like most readers up to that point and until social media-- I had to use my own resources to imagine what things were like. There weren't the films, memes, fan art, and all that: ideas and objects that are probably well-nigh inescapable now. I think it would be unusual to start reading LOTR now with no prior expectations.
Both items (1) and (2) were/are individual to me, and different for each of us. I grew up (and have remained) living in Southern England so my experiences relate to that countryside, and those cultures. It will come out differently, I expect, if someone is imagining Kentucky rather than Kent, Darjeeling rather than Dorset, or Oregon rather than Oxfordshire.
But, given what my own (1) and (2) are, I don't think The Shire is really closely based on any real English Village, or anywhere I could have visited, or read about from the history of Tolkien's time. It seems obvious to me that Tolkien is capitalising on tropes about English Country Life. Ideas of how it used to be that had percolated into British or English culture, whether or not they could be confirmed by dilligent historians.
It's notable that either side of Tolkien's birth there was a lot of interest in the real or imagined state of how things used to be*. Maybe it was a reaction to the early and rapid industrialisation and urbification of England in the Nineteenth Century. That would seem to me to explain what might seem an oddity: that it's a specifically rural English idyll when long before Tolkien was born the English had become (statistically speaking) an urban and suburban people.
But there it is, a set of ideas in the culture providing a large bank of images and tropes Tolkien could use (or which I find I use whether or not that was what Tolkien hoped or expected).
I think that was a good choice by Tolkien (if it was a choice). Few things slow down a fantasy or science fiction story to such a turgid mess as an author who insists on too-speedily introducing the minutae of the orignal landscape or culture or language they've had fun inventing**.
---*For a prodigious list of such things from the Edwardian Era, I recommend Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era by Alwyn Turner, published by Profile. There's also an interesting analysis, but it is too long for me either to attempt to summarise, or to quote directly.
** This is done enough to have, for example a Turkey City Lexicon entry:Call a Rabbit a Smeerp
A cheap technique for false exoticism, in which common elements of the real world are re-named for a fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior. “Smeerps” are especially common in fantasy worlds, where people often ride exotic steeds that look and act just like horses. (Attributed to James Blish).
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"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
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noWizardme
Half-elven
Wed, 10:57am
Post #44 of 61
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A whiff of Kentucky moonshine, I think?
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Wait, how would that work, exactly?
If genuine parallels in names and speech exist with Kentucky I'm not surprised, but I suspect that is to do with where the Old Country was for a lot of (white) Kentuckyians.
For fun, I'm imagining how such things could have become unique to Kentucky.
Let's have Daniel Boone (I think it was?) leading that expedition of people into Kentucky and then demanding that they abandon the names and manner of speaking they have brought with them from The Old Country.
"From now on," Daniel says "you shall be known by the hobbit-style names I shall now give you, and speak in a new way that I shall proceed to teach!"
Fun to imagine, but most likely that didn't happen-- and any Shire-style surnames or talk found in Kentucky came across from the Old World.
Hobbit-talk is easily derrived from British English accents. I can vouch for that personally - to me it sounds like a sometimes exaggerated version of how a lot of my family talk. I can also hear accents like it in my home of Oxfordshire too.
And then of course there is the long English literary tradition of 'Mummerset' accents (an exaggerated ?Somerset accent for theatrical use) to render rustic folk. Not a terribly respectful tradition, and one that has resulted in some class snobbery about west-country accents. But it's an obvious trope for Tolkien to use to communicate an honest and uprightbut slightly comical and slow-witted rusticity. For the same reasons, Tolkien makes his criminal but stupid Trolls speak 'mockney' in The Hobbit.
That doesn't disprove Barnett's tale about Tolkien enjoying Kentucky yarns, of course.
But I don't think we have to conclude there's an American source for hobbit names or hobbit-talk when there are such easily available ones closer to Tolkien's home and culture.
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"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
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noWizardme
Half-elven
Wed, 12:28pm
Post #45 of 61
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I think this is (yet another) place where different theories are all perfectly plausible, and there is no way to adjudicate.
So it's like that prank they used to play on each new Dwarf down the mine - viz. show them two shovels and say "take your pick!"
The Shire as an especially delightful habitat bound to attract hobbits (or to which hobbits are quietly induced to go by Powers, knowing they would stay)? That's an idea that could easily appear in The Quest of Erebor (UT). There, it seems like everything is part of Eru's grand plan for coutering Sauron. For example, by getting the Ring secretly to some place far from Mordor where nobody would expect it to be (and into the hands of someone who probably wouldn't become a murderer or meglomaniac because of keeping it awhile).
Or, if one feels that hobbits are a folk of lowland farmland, then of course they like The Shire. But they might equally like any of the other places there could be in Middle-earth that were (or could be made into) such habitat.
Take your shovel ...I mean, your pick!
~~~~~~
"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
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noWizardme
Half-elven
Wed, 1:45pm
Post #46 of 61
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I'm thinking about one of several contrasts one could go for:
The Shire hobbits are complacently sure of their little place in the world. They don't fear for the future because of the assumption that nothing need change (most hobbits) or that change can surely be controlled and regulated for one's own benefit (Lotho). They don't understand or worry about the things on which the continuation of their lifestyle depends, how easily it could change, or how their own culture could feed into a collapse.
Gondor, on the other hand is very aware of its past and present place in the world order. It's very aware of its own decline, and the growing menace of its rival in world politics, Mordor.
Both cultures can be a source of strength and rootedness (for Frodo, Sam; and for Faramir). But Gondor (better than the Shire) shows up the catastrophic results of trying to fix things the wrong way (Denethor's madness; that regrettable deal with Sauron about 9 Rings, those attempts to push longevity beyond what is natural by other means; Gondorian ethno-chauvanism leading to the kin-strife).
It probably means nothing, but...
... if Tolkien had been a programmatic writer (which he wasn't) ....and if he had been wanting to portray different sides of the British character (which I don't think he did)...
..If all that, then The Shire would do for Honest Rustic Simplicity, and Gondor would do for proud, militiristic maritime empire, getting (by the time of Tolkien's birth) into a funk about its real or imagined decline into decadance and the liklihood of a coming Big War.
Along with reading it for the bit about rural idyll, I've been enoying reading 'Little Englanders' for the bit about the Edwardian genre of Invasion Scare stories -- a genre whcih tracked this bit of period paranoia. As seems so often the case, parody is a good way of explaining succinctly what ideas the genre contained (parodists have a helpful way of saying the quiet bit -- whispered or dog-whistled in the 'serious' literature-- out loud, and especially loudly):
“It fell to P. G. Wodehouse to satirise the genre. In The Swoop (1909) the Germans land in Essex on the same day that, coincidentally, several other countries–from Russia to Monaco–also invade Britain. None of them meets with any resistance because the British army has been abolished by a socialist government in the name of equality: ‘They demanded that every man in the army should be a general.’ The consequence is instant capitulation. ‘England was not merely beneath the heel of the invader. It was beneath the heels of nine invaders. There was barely standing-room.’
Happily, one power remains capable of resisting this occupation. The Boy Scouts are still a force to be reckoned with, especially with the rapid promotion to chief Scout of fourteen-year-old Clarence Chugwater. Learning that the German and Russian generals have been employed as freak turns to tell their stories on the music-hall stage, he sparks professional jealousy between them, splitting their alliance. In any event, the foreign troops are growing restless, unable to cope with either the attitude of the conquered–‘the cold, contemptuous, patronising gaze of the Englishman’–or the weather: ‘The late English summer had set in with all its usual severity, and the Cossacks, reared in the kindlier climate of Siberia, were feeling it terribly.’
The result is a huge, mutually destructive battle between the occupiers, fought on Hampstead Heath ‘in the densest, yellowest London particular [i.e. a thick smog - NoWiz] that had been experienced for years’. Those who survive are easy prey for the Boy Scouts, armed with hockey sticks and catapults. ‘I am England,’ Clarence declaims to the German general, in triumph. ‘I am the Chief Scout, and the Scouts are England. Prince Otto, you thought this England of ours lay prone and helpless. You were wrong.’”
— Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era by Alwyn Turner
'Chugwater' - sounds hobbity to me?
~~~~~~
"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
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CuriousG
Half-elven
Wed, 4:09pm
Post #47 of 61
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Marcho to Blanco: "I think we're meant to live here. Start unpacking."
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Some good things are just meant to happen. *sigh*
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CuriousG
Half-elven
Wed, 4:22pm
Post #48 of 61
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Leaping ahead: complacency vs awareness/vigilance
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I hope those Boy Scouts also peppered the enemy with a hail of stones shot from homemade sliingshots, which is my chief memory of childhood Boy Scout tricks. Slingshots seemed miraculous to a 5-year-old; I'm sure you could take down Smaug with one.
But it struck me on reading your post, even though I'm jumping too far ahead, that the Shire's enviable complacency was their Achilles' Heel since they had so social or political mechanism for preventing Lotho & the ruffians' rise to power, and arguably they had no effective resistance until Frodo & Co returned (just ask Fredegar Bolger how the resistance went for him).
That's not a criticism of Shire culture, and I think Tolkien's larger point was that nearly every good place was beset by evil whether vigilant or not, from Lorien to Bree to Mirkwood to Dale, and the Shire faced its own version of evil, lumped in with Gondor and the rest. And post-ruffians, the hobbits went back to complacency and didn't become a militarized, hyper-vigilant society, which speaks to the resilient pacifism and de-centralized DNA of their culture. All that is jumping ahead, but it seemed in context at the moment.
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Silvered-glass
Lorien
Wed, 4:55pm
Post #49 of 61
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The Shire always was somewhat an alien place to me. It's not only the underground-dwelling little people that impart a degree of strangeness, but also things like the pipe-smoking and the handwritten letters that are such integral parts of the Shire culture. Edwardian England is a very specific place in space and time, and that place is constantly getting more distant. Soon Tolkien's intended literary effect of easing the reader into the fantasy realm will no longer be functional, and I would argue that this is already the case for some people.
Perhaps it is this degree of detachment that I have that allows me to consider options outside of the mainstream, such as the possibility of express trains truly being known in Middle-earth.
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noWizardme
Half-elven
Wed, 5:03pm
Post #50 of 61
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~~~~~~
"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
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