Hobbits

The people called themselves Hobbits, and among the Big Folk — their own plain term for Men, set against the Little Folk — the commoner name was Halfling, a word that fixes on stature rather than character, since a full-grown hobbit stands at roughly half a man's height. In Sindarin the same idea appears as Perian, plural Periannath, and it was in that form that they were spoken of in Gondor, where they had long passed out of memory into the status of a half-believed traveller's tale. The Rohirrim, whose ancestors had lived near them in the north, kept an older word: holbytla, plural holbytlan, meaning builders of holes, which Théoden recalls from the songs and half-forgotten lore of his people when he first meets two of them in the flesh. Within their own country they were simply the Shire-folk.

Tolkien's account of the names is complicated, deliberately, by the fiction that the whole narrative is a translation. On that reckoning the ordinary Westron word for the race was banakil, rendered as Halfling; the name the people used of themselves was kuduk, current only in the Shire and in Bree and not elsewhere. This he traced to an older northern form, kûd-dûkan, hole-dweller, surviving in the speech of Rohan, which he represented by the Old English holbytla so that an English reader could see the same worn-down relation between the archaic word and the modern one that stands between kûd-dûkan and kuduk. Hobbit is thus offered not as an invention but as the English equivalent of a name already worn smooth by use.

As to descent, they are stated to be relatives of Men, nearer to us in kind than either Elves or Dwarves, though the link is nowhere traced and they themselves preserved no records of the time before their settlement in the west. They first come into view in the upper vales of the Anduin, between Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains, already divided into three strains: the Harfoots, smallest and most numerous, brown-skinned, hill-dwellers and long on good terms with Dwarves; the Stoors, broader and heavier, at home in flat country and by rivers; and the Fallohides, fairer in skin and hair, taller and less numerous, drawn to trees and readier than the others to deal with Elves. Their own traditions gave two reasons for the westward crossing of the mountains into Eriador — the increase of Men and a shadow settling on the great forest — and the three kinds went over at different times and by different ways before mingling in the lands where they afterwards remained. From The Hobbit onward they are also simply what the wider world assumed them to be: a small, quiet people little given to explaining themselves.

The written record of the people begins late and thinly. In the annals of the North-kingdom they are first noticed about the year 1050 of the Third Age, when the earliest of the three kindreds had come into Eriador; a further hundred years brought the others, one strain passing south of the Misty Mountains and lingering for a time in Dunland before turning north again. What followed the crossing the Shire-folk themselves called the Wandering Days, and they kept almost no account of it. They founded no realm and claimed no lordship, but settled quietly in the country between Weathertop and the Brandywine, and above all at Bree, where they lived beside Men on easy terms and where a hobbit settlement endured longer than any other. Throughout this period they were, in law, subjects of the kings of Arnor and afterwards of Arthedain, though the kings' wars seldom touched them and they took little notice of them.

In the year 1601 two brothers of the fair-skinned kindred, Marcho and Blanco, obtained leave of Argeleb II at Fornost to cross the Brandywine westward, and led a considerable following over the bridge into the empty land beyond. The king's grant carried obligations rather than tribute: they were to keep the great bridge in repair, speed the king's messengers, and acknowledge his lordship. From that crossing the Shire-folk afterwards reckoned all their years, and the country they took became the Shire. It was not settled by one strain alone; some thirty years later a body of the river-loving kindred came up out of Dunland and established themselves in the marshy south-east, where their descendants long remained distinguishable from their neighbours in build and in custom.

The kingdom that had granted them their land did not outlive them. When Angmar broke Arthedain and Fornost fell in 1974, the Shire, protected by its remoteness, came through the ruin nearly untouched; its own tradition held that it had sent archers north to the king's aid, a claim no record of Men confirms. With the northern line ended, the inhabitants chose a chieftain of their own to hold the king's authority in his absence, and the first of these Thains was Bucca of the Marish. The office stayed in his family for some seven centuries before passing by descent to the Tooks, in whose house it afterwards remained. In the meantime Gorhendad Oldbuck had taken his people back across the river to the eastern bank, delved Brandy Hall in the hill above it, and founded the country called Buckland, which was governed by the Master of the Hall and never quite counted as part of the Shire proper.

Peace was not unbroken. In 2747 an Orc-band out of the north crossed the borders and was routed in the North Farthing by Bandobras Took, whose height was remarked on even among Men and whose club is said to have struck the head from the Orc-chieftain Golfimbul; the encounter, remembered as the Battle of Greenfields, remained for over two hundred and fifty years the only fighting on Shire soil. Harder trials came from the weather. The Long Winter of 2758 and 2759 brought famine and death across the whole of Eriador, and the Shire survived it partly through Gandalf's intervention; the lean years that followed were remembered long afterwards. In the Fell Winter of 2911 the rivers froze and white wolves came over the ice of the Brandywine into the land, a memory still current among the older inhabitants in the days of the Ring.

What finally drew the people into the general history of Middle-earth had begun far away and long before, among a remnant of the river-dwelling strain that had never left the Vales of Anduin; it was one of these who took the One Ring from the water and carried it into the roots of the mountains. The Ring came out of hiding in 2941, when Bilbo Baggins of Hobbiton was carried east on an errand of Dwarves and returned with it unregarded in his pocket. Sixty years later it left the Shire again in his heir's keeping, and four of the Shire-folk went out with the Company that bore the Ring's fate: two of them served in the wars of Rohan and Gondor and made the name Periannath a matter of general knowledge there, while the other two crossed into Mordor. In their absence the Shire itself was seized by ruffians under Saruman and held under a régime of gathering and sharing; the four returned to break it, and the Battle of Bywater in 1419 of the Shire's reckoning was the second and last battle ever fought within its bounds.

The people did not decline afterwards; they prospered, and for a while stood higher in the world's regard than at any time before or since. The restored King of the reunited kingdoms declared the Shire a free land under his protection and forbade Men to enter it, naming the Thain, the Master and the Mayor his counsellors in the North; in 1452 he added the Westmarch, between the Far Downs and the Tower Hills, to their territory, and its wardens kept the manuscript from which the chief record of the War descends. Of the four travellers, one was chosen Mayor seven times over and one succeeded to the Thainship, while the two who had ridden in the southern wars went back to Gondor as old men and ended their days there. Beyond that the record of the Shire's own annals gives little, and the account written for readers outside it ends by noting only that the people had since grown shy of the Big Folk and hard to find, though they were assuredly still there.

All of them had begun as diggers, and though by the end of the Third Age most lived in houses of wood and brick, the tunnel kept its prestige: the richest still had many-roomed smials driven into a hillside, and the poorest bare burrows. They were farmers and gardeners before anything else, and their crafts went no further than the hand could carry — weaving, baking and brewing, work in wood and leather — while machinery beyond a hand-loom, a mill turned by water or the bellows of a forge was met with distrust. They dressed in bright colours, yellow and green for choice, and went unshod, their soles tough and the tops of their feet thick with curling hair. Heavy though they grew about the middle, they moved without noise, could disappear into cover when strangers came near, and threw stones with an accuracy that surprised those who saw it.

They ate often, six times a day where the larder allowed, and their custom in gifts ran contrary to most, since presents were given out by the hobbit whose birthday it was. Little was thrown away: anything with no present use but too good to discard became a mathom, and enough of these accumulated to fill a house at Michel Delving that served the country as a museum. They wrote books, but mostly genealogies, compiling the pedigrees of the older families with an exactness they brought to nothing else. Of arts they reckoned their own they claimed only one, the smoking of pipe-weed, which their tradition credited to Tobold Hornblower of Longbottom in the Southfarthing, who first raised it as a crop about the year 1070 of their own reckoning.

Their old tongue they had given up long before, taking to the Common Speech of the western lands, which they used in a countrified manner of their own and salted with old words and older names for the months and days; one of them caused talk in Gondor by addressing the Steward in the familiar forms proper between equals. Time they ordered to suit themselves, in twelve months of thirty days with the remaining days set outside them, so that every date fell on the same weekday year after year. They came of age at thirty-three, called the years before that the tweens, and thought a hundred a great age, though the Old Took passed a hundred and thirty. They were mortal and left no teaching about what came after; their memorial was the family tree, and a usage old enough was called simply the Rules and kept for being old and fair.

By the end of the Third Age the three strains had long since run together, and no hobbit of the Shire could be assigned wholly to one of them; yet the account of the people insists that the mixture was uneven, and that the old kinds could still be read in particular districts and particular families. Harfoot blood was reckoned the general inheritance, and gave the ordinary Shire-hobbit his build and his habits. The Stoorish element survived most plainly in the Marish and across the water in Buckland, where the inhabitants kept a liking for boats and were among the few who could swim, and where, alone in the country, some wore boots in muddy weather. The Fallohide part, thinnest of the three, was held to persist among the leading families, and the readiness of the Tooks and the Brandybucks to do unusual things was explained by it.

The land itself was ordered by kinship as much as by geography. It was divided into four Farthings, and these into smaller districts called folklands that still carried the names of families once dominant in them, though by the time of the War of the Ring those names were scattered and no longer confined to their proper ground. The two greatest houses each had a seat and a hereditary style: the Tooks held the Great Smials at Tuckborough in the country called after them, and the head of the family, addressed simply as the Took, was also Thain; the Brandybucks held Brandy Hall, and their head was Master of Buckland. Below these ran a long roll of respectable names — Bagginses, Boffins, Bolgers, Bracegirdles, Grubbs, Chubbs, Burrowses, Proudfoots and the rest, with the Sackville-Bagginses a branch made by marriage and long fixed on the possession of Bag End. Working families such as the Gamgees and the Cottons had neither hall nor headship, and are recorded chiefly through the households they served or farmed beside.

Because descent decided so much, the pedigrees of the chief houses were kept with care, and the record set down for outside readers preserves the trees of the Bagginses of Hobbiton, the Tooks of the Great Smials and the Brandybucks of Buckland, together with a line traced for the Gamgees. Two houses were founded out of that last stock after the war: the descendants of Samwise took the name Gardner, and his eldest daughter, marrying into a family of the far west of the country, began the line of the Fairbairns, who dwelt at Undertowers and held the office of Warden of the Westmarch.

The narrative of both books is pitched at hobbit eye level, and much of its method depends on that choice. The reader enters Middle-earth through a comfortable parlour and an unwanted visitor, and the world widens only as the hobbit at the centre of the scene is forced to notice it; the tone accordingly shifts from domestic comedy toward something graver as the distance from home increases, with the small folk carrying that change on their own reactions rather than through any change of narrator. They also supply the standard against which the great powers are measured. What is defended in the war is never described in terms of thrones or armies alone but in terms of an ordinary country whose inhabitants have no notion that they are being defended, and the Prologue's patient, slightly pedantic account of their customs establishes that ordinariness before the story puts it at risk.

Within the plot they function as the element none of the calculating parties has weighed. Gandalf's insistence on a hobbit for the errand rests on the same reasoning that Elrond gives at his council, that a task beyond the strength of the strong may fall to the weak because the Enemy measures all things by desire for power and cannot conceive of a bearer who does not want the thing he carries. Their resistance to the Ring is relative rather than absolute — it is a matter of holding out longer, not of being immune — and the long survival of an earlier hobbit bearer in the dark is offered as evidence of both the toughness and the ruin. The two who ride south are shown growing into service under lords of Men, and one of them strikes the blow that makes the Witch-king's fall possible; the return home then completes the pattern by having them set their own country right without help.

Tolkien's own comments on the design make the point explicitly. He described the story as turning on the raising up of the humble and the unregarded, and treated the hobbits as the means by which that reversal is dramatised rather than merely asserted. He was equally clear that the Ring-bearer does not finally succeed by strength of will: at the last the claim is made and the errand fails, and what saves it is pity long since shown and mercy not withheld. On his reading the honour afterwards paid to the bearer is deserved for what was endured rather than for a victory won, which is why the small folk end the story praised in Gondor and unchanged in themselves.

The people have no place in the earliest strata of Tolkien's mythology; they enter his writing with The Hobbit and reach the larger legendarium only through the drafts of its sequel, where much that later looks settled was long unfixed. In the first attempts at the opening chapter the hobbit who inherits the ring and leaves the Shire is not Frodo but Bingo Bolger-Baggins, conceived at the outset as Bilbo's son and afterwards as his adopted heir, and the name Frodo belongs to a quite different character, Frodo Took, one of the companions who walk out with him. Only in a later phase of writing was Bingo abandoned and the protagonist renamed. His fellow travellers shifted comparably: Meriadoc Brandybuck began as Marmaduke, an Odo Bolger occupied a place in the party for a long time before being divided and displaced, and Samwise Gamgee, indispensable in the finished book, was not present at all when the journey was first drafted.

The most consequential of these variants concerned a hobbit who eventually ceased to be one. The weather-beaten stranger encountered at the inn in Bree was first a hobbit called Trotter, marked out by the wooden shoes he wore, and Tolkien for a time contemplated identifying him with a relation of Bilbo's, Peregrin Boffin, who had gone off adventuring and returned altered; the decision that the Ranger was instead a Man, and that his name was Aragorn, was reached only in the drafting of the Council of Elrond, after which the discarded first name was given to a Took. Later material shows the reverse process, the account of the people being deepened after the narrative was largely done: the Prologue's systematic description, including the division into three kindreds and the antiquarian framing of hobbit history, took shape through several successive versions. An epilogue in which Samwise, many years on, answers his children's questions about what became of everyone was written, revised and then set aside as unsuitable to the book's close.

On screen and on air the people are represented almost entirely by the few individuals the stories follow. Orson Bean voiced Bilbo in the Rankin/Bass television film of the earlier novel, and took the part of Frodo as well in the same studio's version of the last part of the longer book, where Roddy McDowall played Samwise. Bakshi's film cast Christopher Guard as Frodo, Michael Scholes as Sam, Dominic Guard as Pippin and Simon Chandler as Merry, their movement drawn in part over filmed actors. The BBC dramatisation used Ian Holm as Frodo, Bill Nighy as Sam and John Le Mesurier as Bilbo; Holm returned two decades later as Bilbo for Peter Jackson, whose four travellers were Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan, with Martin Freeman taking the younger Bilbo in the second trilogy. Difference of stature there was managed by forced perspective, doubled sets built to two scales, and stand-ins of smaller build rather than by any effect applied to the actors.

The departures are consistent in one respect: the domestic material at either end of the book is the first thing cut. Bakshi, the radio series and Jackson all pass over the Old Forest, Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-downs, and Jackson additionally compresses the long interval between the birthday party and the departure from Bag End, brings Merry and Pippin into the journey by accident instead of by the deliberate conspiracy of the novel, and drops the return home altogether, so that the four come back to a country that has never been occupied and needs no setting right. The Rankin/Bass treatment of the last part begins with the quest already far advanced and leaves most of the earlier narrative unrepresented. The radio version, longest of the older adaptations, is the only one of them to dramatise the retaking of the Shire.