It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life

Cafe Society
1

Lots of Web sites have “It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life” as a quote from Tolkien. Where is it, does anyone know? I don’t remember reading such a line, but I’m a tyro compared to some here on the boards.

2

Well, I haven’t read everything Tolkien wrote and haven’t memorized every line of Tolkien that I have read, but I’m gonna stick my neck out here and opine that that “quote” is made up/misattributed.

I’ve seen claims that it’s spoken by Bilbo in Fellowship of the Ring. AFAICT, it may be in the movie screenplay, but it’s not in the book itself.

3

I doubt whether he said it.

It sounds like it could have come from one of Tolkien’s letters, rather than from his books. But I just checked his collected letters, and there’s nothing like that there.

4

It’s in the movie screenplay (by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philppa Boyens): see the end of this clip. Some fool of a Took heard that line or saw it quoted and jumped to the conclusion that it was actually in Tolkien’s books, but I’ll bet anything you like that it isn’t.

5

I just asked about this in a mailing list that includes a lot of Tolkien scholars. It’s not from Tolkien. One person says that it sounds like “a distillation of Thorin’s far more elegant last words”, but it isn’t Tolkien.

6

Thanks all, it was my belief that it should be correctly attributed to Walsh/Boyens/Jackson and it would appear that I’m right.

7

Thanks all, it was my belief that it should be correctly attributed to Walsh/Boyens/Jackson and it would appear that I’m right.

8

I did a mass phrase search of essentially all of JRRT’s books relating to Middle Earth, including HOMES, etc. looking for the phrase “simple life”. It turns up ONLY ONCE, in Unfinished Tales, APPENDIX B THE SINDARIN PRINCES OF THE SILVAN ELVES"

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9

duplicate from glitching board