Eats, COMMA, shoots and leaves.
Jesus, you’re about as funny as a screen door on a destroyer!
How so? Before their lives were changed by the Ring and their adventures, that is? In particular, I was speaking of Bilbo before anything extraordinary happened to him.
Do you mean, because they were capable of having adventures? I would say that one of the themes of the books is that perfectly ordinary hobbits are capable of remarkable things, should the occasion arise–as Tolkien himself put it, “There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow.”
As for reproductive proclivities, I’ve glanced over a few hobbit family trees. If I’m reading them correctly, it looks like the prominent clans have a lot of variation in family size. A substantial number die without issue, and many others only seem to have one child. On the other hand, some have absolutely huge families–Gerontius, the Old Took, had 12 kids, though 4 died without issue (assuming Hidefons wasn’t off making three-quarterlings with some Big chick somewhere).
I’m so damn glad that I don’t have a clue what you are talking about.
Yeah, but it’s made pretty clear (especially in one of, I think, the Unfinished Tales where Gandalf is telling a fuller version of the start of the Lonely Mountain quest) that Gandalf had hand-picked Bilbo as a particularly likely candidate for successful adventuring.
Yes, Bilbo was superficially rather the stodgy-bourgeois type, but it’s made clear that he always had a rather unusual streak of wanderlust in him, probably due mostly to his mother, the remarkable Belladonna Took (although I don’t think we ever learn exactly why she was remarkable). In fact, I think it’s suggested somewhere that this deeply latent daring is ultimately why Bilbo didn’t have a wife and family: on some unconscious level, he didn’t want to be tied down and not be free to roam when the fancy finally took him.
Frodo, Merry and Pippin all share this disproportionately adventurous/heroic tendency, and none of them are really “perfectly ordinary hobbits” either. Tolkien leaves little doubt that their unusually spirited nature is connected to their “Fallohidish” heritage, which originally caused the social and economic predominance of families like the Tooks and Brandybucks among hobbits of the Shire.
Remember, Tolkien was writing in Britain in the first half of the 20th century and was not any kind of communist or radical egalitarian when it came to class issues. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that almost all of his hobbit heroes came from what his readers would have considered “good families”. Merry and Pippin, as the heirs-apparent of the Brandybuck and Took families respectively, were in fact the closest thing the Shire had to wealthy and privileged hereditary aristocrats. (And Frodo was closely connected to both families, although he temporarily took on the epic’s obligatory “hero as disinherited prince in disguise” role by being orphaned at an early age and reduced to something like a poor relation among the Brandybucks before Bilbo adopts him.)
The only hobbit of truly plebeian background who achieves greatness at a comparable level is Sam Gamgee, and it’s made very plain that the quality that enables Sam’s innate nobility of spirit to flourish is his humble and determined fidelity of service to his master. He does later rise to social elevation as a reward for his good and faithful service, but I can’t imagine that Gandalf would have independently picked him out to participate in great deeds the way he deliberately selected Sam’s “masters and betters”, Bilbo and Frodo.
There aren’t more hobbits because they follow the writings of Thomas Swift. They’re all about food and eating. Why else would they have so many kids?
Also, the Great Eagles get hungry too.
Also, Frodo had inherited what appears to have been head of the Baggins clan, hence inheriting Bag End. So he was a scion of three of the ‘best’ families in the Shire, with two of them (the Tooks and the Brandybucks) known for their eccentricity popping up occasionally throughout the generations.
And Samwise did not return to the life he would have had if he had never left. He became the Mayor for seven seven-year terms, he wrote some of the Red Book, and his daughter not only married a Took, but became a titled person in her own right, maid of honor to Queen Arwen, and married to the newly created Warden of Westmarch, and eventual keeper of the Red Book. He had been a gardener, for heaven’s sake, a servant of the meaner sort, although knowledgeable enough in his own field to merit some public respect, as t’Gaffer had before him had. Such people do not usually gain public office, at least not in Tolkien’s world, let alone become scholarly.
And Sam had been unusual prior to his adventure. He was fascinated by Elves, for one thing, and that in itself was considered odd by hobbits in general. He’d been, you might say, corrupted by Bilbo’s tales when he was a lad, and got ideas that probably were considered above his station, as well as unnatural for a hobbit. I don’t think Gandalf considered him quite ordinary, and I don’t think he believed that his exceptionalism was simply a matter of his devotion to Frodo, although that was certainly an element in his decision to send Sam along.
From the family trees, it appears that the size of hobbit families varied considerably, and I didn’t get the impression that five or six children was routine. And bear in mind that, despite the fairly rich living that the Shire enjoyed, many hobbits probably died in infancy and childhood, especially among the poorer families. Bilbo left old Hamfast two sacks of potatoes, a new spade, a woolen waistcoat, and some rheumatism ointment in his will, which suggests that food was not as highly plentiful as is suggested in this thread.
Come to think of it, one other point I just remembered: Somewhere it explicitly says that large families are themselves a mark of status among hobbits.
Good points. And Bilbo taught Sam to read and write, which was apparently not typical for a hobbit of his class and which the Gaffer wasn’t entirely comfortable with (saying something like “Mr. Bilbo’s learned him his letters, meaning no harm and I hope no harm will come of it”, IIRC).
So yeah, none of the four hobbit Fellowship members was really what one might call a “perfectly ordinary hobbit”.
I think Balance is quite right that Tolkien meant to convey that even very ordinary hobbits can show unexpected initiative and bravery on a smaller scale, e.g., in fighting the Shirrifs in the Scouring of the Shire and so forth. But the adventures of the Fellowship were emphatically on a higher level of danger and heroism than that, and I don’t think Tolkien intended to suggest that they would have been achievable by any except a very few of “nature’s nobility” among hobbitkind.
It seems to me that the hobbit population has a lot of “confirmed bachelors”. That may have something to do with their limited fertility.
That’s part of what I had in mind. I have a vivid mental image of Farmer Cotton, calmly smoking his pipe and waiting to confront a troop of armed Men. I’m not entirely sure the scale matters so much in terms of courage, though. I can certainly believe that most hobbits would not have the intelligence, knowledge, or skills to meet the challenges of the epic quest, but I find it plausible that they’d have the guts to try, if it came right down to it.
lemma have a go. first assumption is it’s largely a farming district. the land is fertile but also finite so holding capacity is limited, as well as density and built-up ratio. a one hobbit per 10 sq mile density (farming) = 3,000 hobbits (maximum)
let’s try another tack: major names are took, baggins, bolger, brandybuck, proudfoot, chubb, cotton, oldbuck, sackville, gamgee, gardner, boffin, fairbairn, burrows. that’s 14. assuming three generations flourishing and inter-marriage happening in the first two (it did mention that bachelors and spinsters are the exeption.) = 1,750 hobbits (5^3 x 14)
last, did it mention that during the early part of the third age, the thain sent 300 hobbit archers to aid the king of the north? if your fighting population is 300, then you total population might be 1,800.
I’m not sure I have ever agreed with Hobbit ages being meant as 33=21, literally. The modern age of majority being 21 is more a cultural thing. Hebrews consider 13 as adulthood. There’s no literal demarcation at which one becomes an adult. Biologically, one can be considered “mature” when one can sexually reproduce, which can be long before 21.
Hobbits are a very conservative culture. They keep to themselves and rarely get into adventures. They value work and staying out of trouble. One of the running gags in LOTR is that while the other countries have heard of “halflings”, none have any stories or songs about them.
Consider our own culture. While 21 is technically adulthood, we really don’t settle down until our thirties. The twenties are a period of wild abandon and reckless indulgence for a lot of us. By our thirties, most of us have settled down and are raising kids. I’ve always believed the Hobbits took that into account and in their culture, sobering up and settling down is the sign of adulthood, hence 33 is when one “comes of age”. I believe that a 33 year old Hobbit is essentially the same as a 33 year old human, rather than the commonly held belief that Hobbits physically mature slower than humans.
Tolkien specifically says that *Elves *mature slower than Men, but I don’t think he ever actually says that of Hobbits. Hobbits live in an idealized time with few if any diseases (I presume merely because the Elves still dwelt in the land. Once they left, then decay set in.). Presuming healthy living and no diseases, the upper limit to Hobbit ages (100 or so-Bilbo was considered especially impressive but not typical) would apply to Men, as well (not including special races like Numenoreans- they were descended from Elves and/or specially gifted with longevity directly from the Vala, so they don’t count). Fifty isn’t an outrageous age for Bilbo to go off. Also, Pippin being confused for a child isn’t because he was late twenties and not “of age”, but because he was 4 1/2 feet tall.
I don’t think ‘coming of age’ was an entirely social construct, caligula. It’s stated that hobbits lived to 100 often as not. Until modern medicine and nutrition, a human’s lifespan was typically considered to be 70 years. That really does indicate a longer life-cycle. While Pippin was confused for a child in Minas Tirith because of his stature, Elrond had no such misapprehensions, but still considered Pippin too young to continue with the Fellowship, although he allowed himself to be over-ruled by Gandalf. So, while 33 may not have precisely corresponded with 18 or 21 in humans, I do believe that it was a physically less mature age for hobbits than 33 is for humans. Note that Tolkien’s narration certainly deals with Merry and Pippin as if they were quite young, and the best friend Pippin makes on that journey is a ten year old boy.
mac_bollan, with the exception of Cottons, the Gamgees and the Gardners (the latter being a newly assumed name, not an ancestral one, as the Brandybucks were to the Oldbucks), all the family names you mention are likely to have been the upper class hobbits. I’ll bet you there weren’t any Cottons at that party, nor were the Sandymans likely to have been invited (at least to the one gross table, which appears to have been filled entirely with family or close family friends. Maybe the party as a whole.). Not that Bilbo was particularly a snob, but in the course of life, one generally ends up knowing people of one’s own class, and Bilbo was about as upper class as the Shire could get. For agrarian societies, the SE class distribution is typically pyramid shaped, so I think we can assume that the lower classes far outnumbered the number of people closely enough associated with Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin to be mentioned specifically in the Red Book. I really don’t think the Shire, or even Hobbiton, is limited to the fourteen names you mention, not by a long shot.
The answer to the OP may well be that the Shire population is larger than we realize, but very decentralized. They would spread to the West, I’d think, and there may have been plenty of tiny hamlets of ten or twelve families of fairly good size, each hamlet surrounded by the farms they all worked. Such people would likely only come to Hobbiton a few times a year, to sell their produce, get their corn ground, and buy what they needed and couldn’t make (and of course, to visit relations with whom they kept touch).
well they have hair on their palms and feet so they’re not just having sex with each other.
Remember, Middle-earth is an idealized time with no disease or McDonalds. There’s nothing that contradicts anything I suggested. Hobbits can reach 100, as can regular people. We don’t have any indication about regular human life expectancies in Tolkien. Theoden was quite hardy at 70ish. The quest was also going to be dangerous, and several thousand year old Elrond could have had the same misapprehensions about someone in his 20s, as well. I’m only a month or two away from reading (well, listening to the audiobook) the Hobbit and LOTR. I don’t recall Tolkien treating Merry and Pippen as children at all. To someone as stodgy as Tolkien, a twentysomething was a fun loving scamp, like M & P, but there’s nothing that makes them out to be childish (and there are children to compare them to).
I never said that Tolkien treated Merry and Pippen as children. He did, IMO, talk about them as I would about a teenager or quite young adult, someone not quite fully responsible, although they grew up considerably during their adventure, as would be expected. Admittedly, I will grant that Sam married at the age of 30, but I suspect that marital ages among the lower classes were rather younger than those of the upper classes, and Sam, too, had been much matured by his journey.
Theoden and Denethor were considered fairly old men, Denethor older, but also descended of Numenor and thus long-lived. Theoden was in his early 70s, Denethor in his late eighties. Aragorn was granted a life of three times that of man, and lived to about 210. That’s a normal lifespan of seventy years. Not one hundred. That would have been highly exceptional, as it is today, for all but the descendants of Numenor. The Old Took, not helped by any Ring, died at the age of 130, I believe, and was the oldest known hobbit. Tales of the Caucuses notwithstanding, living to 130 is so rare as to be considered unheard of among humans, always excepting the Men of Numenor, who were clearly not normal Men.
That’s not true.
While I agree with most of this in mood, I have to argue against one specific. Merry – book-Merry, to be clear – was clearly a responsible adult. Jackson’s first movie makes them both seem reckless, but that’s just him. It’s clear that he’s the mover and shaker behind the conspiracy to accompany Frodo, and he wasn’t doing it because he thought it would be a fun adventure, as Pippin did. He wasn’t about to let Frodo go off alone, and he knew it was a job that had to be done.
Sam married at 40, as far as I can tell.
Born April 2980, married May 3020.
(I’m taking it on faith that the wiki is accurate.)