More LOTR musing: how big is the Shire (area and population)? And... how inbred are Hobbits?!

Cafe Society
1

According to the timeline in the Appendices in the Return of the King, the Shire was settled by Hobbits in “1601 of the Third Age”, that being made Year 1 in the Shire Reckoning. It was at that time an uninhabited area of Arnor, designated as the King’s hunting grounds. Being as said King was too busy getting slowly crushed by the Witch King of Angmar to do much hunting any more, he decided the Hobbits were useful as a buffer population in the last need and allowed them to settle there. (The Appendix puts it rather more nicely, but it is easy to read between the lines. ;))

By the time of the events in The Hobbit, when we first see the Shire in narrative, it is about 1,300 years later and all four Farthings plus Buckland are populated with Hobbits, though the East Farthing is described as being the most densely populated.

So, just how dense is that? How many Hobbits are there, and how large is the Shire?

Here are the data points I can recall offhand, or look up with relative ease using Internet resources (not having my books close at hand):

[ul]
[li]According to this map of the Shire (presumably based on JRRT source material), it is roughly 150x200 miles in size, or about 30,000 square miles. That’s actually pretty large - about 3 times the size of the state of New Jersey![/li][li] They age more slowly than humans do, “coming of age” at 33 rather than 18 or 21. So every century is about three hobbit generations, making it about 40 generations of hobbits since the founding of the Shire.[/li][li] There is basically no immigration into the Shire; certainly not of Men (Saruman’s henchmen notwithstanding), and relatively little trade traffic (much less population flow) even to Bree where there is another population of Hobbits.[/li][li] Shire hobbits are homebound; few hobbits ever leave the Shire at all. As mentioned, for some time early on there was “much traffic” between the Shire and Bree, where there were other Hobbits, but by the end of the Third Age that had not happened very much for several generations - only a few adventurous Bucklanders now and then who would take in a pint at the Prancing Pony.[/li][li] They have large families. 5 or 6 children seems to be not uncommon. Certainly more than 2 children (the replacement rate) is the norm.[/li][li] They are not warlike; there is little attrition of the population due to conflicts with other hobbits, or Men or Dwarves or Orcs (thanks in no small part to the watch upon their borders by the Rangers). The last real conflict they had was nearly 200 years earlier, in the Long Winter, when a party of Orcs was repelled by the “Bullroarer”, Bandobras Took.[/li][li] They are not, apparently, routinely familiar with famine or disease. In the wake of that Long Winter of nearly 200 years ago, “many” died of famine (the “Days of Dearth”) but to what degree is unknown, and those days are a distant memory of hardship by the end of the Third Age.[/li][/ul]

So: we don’t know the original population size of Shire settlers, but if they were a fecund and circumscribed population at the top of the food chain bounded in a large region with no competition, it seems that they would grow pretty darn fast. Yet by all appearances the Shire is not densely populated.

Thought #1: Given that the Shire is relatively large yet also relatively sparsely populated, just how many hobbits are there in it at the end of the Third Age?

Thought #2: Given the optimal breeding conditions - comfortable and arable climate, plentiful supply of clean water, and (unbeknownst to them) sheltered from enemies - for a stretch of 1,300 years, why aren’t there more of them?

Thought #3: If the answer is that the Long Winter and the Days of Dearth took a very terrible toll on the hobbits, that would mean that most of the population of the Shire is descended from a small survivor group from about 180-200 years earlier. In which case… How inbred are the Shire hobbits?!

Maybe there was a wave of migration from Bree into the Shire about 175 years ago (after the Long Winter), since the hardships must have been as bad or worse out in Breeland, and perhaps the Shirefolk took in large numbers of their Bree cousins to help till the empty fields?

2

The books do say that the hobbits have a zealous interest in genealogy, and they’re shown to routinely track their relationships much further back than most bigs do. For instance, the relationship between Bilbo and Frodo is summarized as just “cousins”, and they’re regarded as relatively closely related, but that “close relation” is double third cousins once removed on one side and fourth cousins once removed on the other. If you work it out, that’s a consanguinity of less than a half a percent, and yet they still consider themselves close kin. If that’s their standard of kinship, I’d say it sounds pretty likely that they go to considerable lengths to outbreed, at least within the confines of the Shire.

3

Yes, but does that jive with the reported average size of a hobbit family and the mathematical facts of how many hobbits there are in the Shire versus how many entered it 1,300 years ago, or versus how many hobbits survived the Long Winter less than 200 years ago?

I realize this is entering “fanwanking” territory but, well, there you are. It’s not like I’m losing sleep over this, but a friend brought this up yesterday (“shouldn’t there be a LOT more hobbits if they’ve had the Shire all to themselves for 1,300 years and have large families?”) and I figured if anybody’s given this any amount of thought, it’d come to light here on the SDMB :slight_smile:

4

I do not think that map is very accurate. It seems to show a number of non-canonical Shire villages - at any rate, I can’t find them in the Encyclopedia of Arda (which is pretty comprehensive) - and it appears to show Southlinch as a village in Breeland, whereas, according to the encyclopedia, it is actually just the name of a variety of pipe weed grown in Bree.

Tolkein’s own maps give the impression of a much more sparsely populated Shire than that one does, although it has always seemed to me that there must have been more villages than he actually shows, and I never really got a very good sense of the size of Michel Delving, which may, in fact, have been an actual town.

5

Late marriage may have been the norm. All of our heroes, at any rate, are batchelors who are all, I think, into their 50s even before their adventures begin.

6

Just because the average marriage produces 5 or 6 children doesn’t mean that each child marries and has 5 or 6 children of their own. If only the owner of the farm or burrow marries, then perhaps only 2 or 3 of those 5 or 6 children will have children, which is much closer to the replacement rate.

And even if there isn’t much disease, a society based on manual labor will have accidents. Frodo, for instance, is living with Bilbo because his parents died in an accident. It was a boating accident and recreation rather than work related, but it shows that you need a few more hobbits than the replacement rate.

I think that all you need are a few unmarried uncles and aunts in each family to even things out.

7

My take on it is much the same.

Take Bilbo, for example. He was quite well off even before his holiday; he had his own home, did not appear to work (beyond a bit of gardening), and had enough food and drink on hand to host an unexpected party for 13 dwarves and a wizard with no great hardship. He had been an adult for 17 years. He was generally well-respected in the community at the time. Yet he was unmarried, seemed to have no prospects for marriage, and I don’t recall any indication that anyone considered this unusual.

It’s possible that Chronos’s point about hobbit notions of consanguinity, combined with the general tendency of hobbits to stick close to home, would explain this. I do not find it implausible that the hobbits, with their fascination with genealogy, would recognize the problems with inbreeding, especially after a population pinch. If they became overly cautious as a result, it might be difficult for young hobbits to find “suitable” mates they can actually get along with in their home village. That would mean that they would have to travel to find a partner. Worse, one or the other would then have to actually move away from their home village. Both actions put the reproductive drive in conflict with a typical hobbit’s homebody nature. Maybe a significant percentage of hobbits would rather just stay home. Only particularly driven or adventurous hobbits would go to the trouble, the former of which might also help account for the large families.

So, were the hobbits–all unknowing–breeding for horniness and adventurousness?

8

Sounds as though they made periodic raids to bring in slave labor and women to me.

I wouldn’t be surprised that it was hushed up in the Red Book or whatever it was called.
:slight_smile:

9

Bilbo and Frodo were, and possibly Sam, but Merry and Pippin were both at the young end of adulthood, having not yet cast off their youthful irresponsibility.

Oh, and to add to Balance’s point about the difficulty of finding a suitable partner, the hobbits also seemed to be a rather class-conscious society, albeit with the potential for upward mobility. The son of a gardener could have aspirations concerning the daughter of a farmer, but Sam would never have dreamed of marrying the likes of a Took or a Brandybuck (some of his descendants did, but only after he’d been a long-established war hero and mayor).

10

Maybe hobbits are like pandas.

11

Frodo was 50, Sam was 38, Merry was 36, and Pippin was 28 when they started out towards Bree. Given the 33 hobbit=21 human, that translates to 32, 24, 23 & 18. Hardly middle aged bachelors. All except Frodo married & had kids after their travels as well - Sam within a year of their return.

12

Frodo & Bilbo both have their first adventure when in their 50s. Sam and Merry are a good deal younger, and Pippin isn’t even technically an adult. A 29-year-old hobbit is the equivalent of a teenager among Men; that’s why Elrond is so opposed to letting the young Took go on the Quest. It’s clear he saw it the way we would see sending a 16-year-old into a war zone.

13

Furthermore, Bilbo has no siblings, and only 4 first cousins.

14

:: pauses in sharpening of battle-axe ::

I’m going to need you to take that back.

15

I don’t think it’s a linear conversion factor, though. Even for hobbits, 50 isn’t young, being about half a typical life expectancy: it’s said that hobbits reached the age of 100 “as often as not”, meaning that about half of them are dead before that age. Bilbo’s last-party age of eleventy-one or 111 was considered rather exceptional, and of course his final age of 131 was literally unprecedented in all of known hobbit history.

So hitting 50 for a hobbit must be more like hitting 40 would be for us nowadays: not old, but not young by anyone’s standards. Remember that as Frodo approached that age, Shirefolk were starting to call him “well-preserved” or unusually youthful-looking, as Bilbo had been before him (both, of course, due to the insidious influence of the Ring). He was definitely getting into middle age as far as years alone went.

So I’d put the human-equivalent ages more like this:

Frodo at hobbit 50 -> human 40

Samwise at 38 -> 28

Merry at 36 -> 24

Pippin at 28 -> 18 (remember that Tolkien considered human majority age to be 21, so Pippin’s human-equivalent age is still a few years short of manhood)

I think it was comparatively rare, but not unheard-of. I can think of a couple of other relatives of Bilbo who died in or after middle age without ever having been married, namely Dora Baggins (Frodo’s elderly aunt) and Lotho “Pimple” Sackville-Baggins (who was four years older than Frodo).

16

Eats shoots and leaves, as the old joke goes?

17

I hardly think Bilbo, Frodo, Pippin or Merry should be used as models for the typical Hobbit.

18

I assume you’re saying that because the first two were Ring-bearers, and the latter two drank Ent-draughts. Or is there another reason? (Since you’re implicitly saying that Samwise is more typical than any of them.)

19

Bilbo, Frodo, Merry and Pippin were all changed significantly by their adventurers. Sam, though, just seemed to remain what he was, only more so: A simple (in the good sense) small-town ordinary guy.

Then again, though, while Bilbo after his adventure could hardly be considered a typical hobbit, the book does make it clear that he was regarded as typical before his adventure.

20

I’m sending a Hobbit raiding party your way. They are nasty little bastards with devices not more complicated than a Luger or a garrote.
Cooperate, things will be more pleasant, you will suffer less.