Hobbits

The Hobbits are the unobtrusive but very ancient people whose story forms the heart of The Lord of the Rings. A little people, smaller than Dwarves, they range in height between two and four feet, seldom now reaching three, and they have dwindled from the taller stature of ancient days. They love peace and quiet and good tilled earth, favoring a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside as their haunt, and they neither understand nor like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they are skillful with tools. Quick of hearing and sharp-eyed, inclined to be fat and not to hurry unnecessarily, they are nonetheless nimble and deft, possessing from the first the art of disappearing swiftly and silently when large folk they do not wish to meet come blundering by—an art developed until it may seem magical to Men, though Hobbits have never studied magic of any kind. Their elusiveness is due solely to a professional skill that heredity, practice, and a close friendship with the earth have rendered inimitable by bigger and clumsier races.

Identity and Background

The Hobbits of the Shire, with whom these tales are concerned, were in the days of their peace and prosperity a merry folk. They dressed in bright colors, being notably fond of yellow and green, but they seldom wore shoes, since their feet had tough leathery soles and were clad in thick curling hair much like the hair of their heads, which was commonly brown. The only craft little practiced among them was shoe-making, yet they had long and skillful fingers and could make many other useful and comely things. Their faces were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful—broad, bright-eyed, red-cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking. And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times and of six meals a day when they could get them. They were hospitable and delighted in parties and in presents, which they gave away freely and eagerly accepted. Objects for which they had no further use but were unwilling to throw away they called mathoms, and their dwellings were apt to become crowded with such things, many of the presents that passed from hand to hand being of that sort.

All Hobbits had originally lived in holes in the ground, or so they believed, and in such dwellings they still felt most at home. In the Shire in Bilbo's days it was, as a rule, only the richest and the poorest Hobbits that maintained the old custom: the poorest went on living in burrows of the most primitive kind, mere holes with only one window or none, while the well-to-do constructed more luxurious versions of the simple diggings of old, the large and ramifying tunnels they called smials. Suitable sites for these were not everywhere to be found, and in the flats and low-lying districts the Hobbits, as they multiplied, began to build above ground. Even in the hilly regions and older villages such as Hobbiton or Tuckborough, or in the chief township of the Shire, Michel Delving on the White Downs, there were now many houses of wood, brick, or stone, specially favored by millers, smiths, ropers, and cartwrights. The habit of building farmhouses and barns was said to have begun among the inhabitants of the Marish down by the Brandywine, whose Hobbits, the Eastfarthing folk, were rather large and heavy-legged, wore dwarf-boots in muddy weather, and were well known to be Stoors in a large part of their blood, as shown by the down that many grew on their chins—no Harfoot or Fallohide had any trace of a beard.

The Ordering of the Shire and Hobbit Society

The Shire was divided into four quarters, the Farthings—North, South, East, and West—and these again each into a number of folklands bearing the names of old leading families, though by the time of this history those names were no longer found only in their proper folklands. Nearly all Tooks still lived in the Tookland, but that was not true of many other families, such as the Bagginses or the Boffins. Outside the Farthings were the East and West Marches: the Buckland and the Westmarch added to the Shire in S.R. 1452. The Shire at this time had hardly any government; families for the most part managed their own affairs, and growing food and eating it occupied most of their time. In other matters they were, as a rule, generous and not greedy, but contented and moderate, so that estates, farms, workshops, and small trades tended to remain unchanged for generations. There remained the ancient tradition concerning the high king at Fornost, or Norbury as they called it, away north of the Shire, but there had been no king for nearly a thousand years, and even the ruins of Kings' Norbury were covered with grass. Yet the Hobbits still said of wild folk and wicked things such as trolls that they had not heard of the king, for they attributed to the king of old all their essential laws and usually kept the laws of free will because they were The Rules, both ancient and just. The Took family had long been pre-eminent, for the office of Thain had passed to them from the Oldbucks some centuries before, and the chief Took had borne that title ever since; the Thain was the master of the Shire-moot and captain of the Shire-muster and the Hobbitry-in-arms, though as muster and moot were only held in times of emergency, which no longer occurred, the Thainship had ceased to be more than a nominal dignity.

Character and Resilience

Despite their ease and peace, this people remained curiously tough. They were, if it came to it, difficult to daunt or to kill, and they were perhaps so unwearyingly fond of good things not least because they could, when put to it, do without them, and could survive rough handling by grief, foe, or weather in a way that astonished those who did not know them well and looked no further than their bellies and well-fed faces. Though slow to quarrel, and for sport killing nothing that lived, they were doughty at bay, and at need could still handle arms. They shot well with the bow, for they were keen-eyed and sure at the mark, and not only with bows and arrows—if any Hobbit stooped for a stone, it was well to get quickly under cover, as all trespassing beasts knew very well. This hidden toughness becomes the narrative's central irony: the people who seem most attached to comfort and most removed from the great conflicts of the age prove to be the ones capable of enduring the Quest's unbearable burden.

The Hobbits in the Great Events

The narrative repeatedly places Hobbits at the center of the world's turning points. The story of the Ring itself begins with a Hobbit, for the first Hobbit to become famous in the world at large was Bilbo, whose journey into the East and return, told in The Hobbit, later involved all the Hobbits in the great events of that Age. The account of the Ring's ancient history reaches back to a people Gandalf guesses were of hobbit-kind, akin to the fathers of the fathers of the Stoors, who loved the River and often swam in it or made little boats of reeds; from this folk came Sméagol, whose discovery of the Ring and whose corruption into Gollum set the long tragedy in motion. When Sméagol, having murdered his friend Déagol for the golden ring, fled into the Misty Mountains and wormed his way like a maggot into the heart of the hills, the Ring went into the shadows with him, and even the maker, when his power had begun to grow again, could learn nothing of it. The wizard Gandalf, reflecting on this story, calls it a sad story that might have happened to others, even to some hobbits that he has known—a quiet acknowledgment that the Hobbits' capacity for both good and corruption is the very substance of the tale.

In the later stages of the Quest, the Hobbits' distinctive character is tested and revealed in extremity. Samwise Gamgee, standing despondently with hunched shoulders beside Frodo on the barren slopes of the Emyn Muil, voices the Hobbit's practical, unadorned assessment of their predicament: they are in a fix and no mistake, having almost lost count of the hours during which they climbed and labored among the barren slopes and stones, sometimes retracing their steps, sometimes wandering in a circle, yet working steadily eastward toward the one place in all the lands they do not want to see any closer—Mordor. Even in this desolation, the Hobbit's earthy realism and loyalty hold firm. The evidence of their passage is marked by homely, recognizable signs: Aragorn, searching for the captured Merry and Pippin, finds a mallorn-leaf of Lórien with small crumbs on it and pieces of cut cord lying nearby, and Gimli draws out a short jagged orc-blade with a carved handle shaped like a hideous head, the haft snapped beside it. Legolas reads the riddle with wry admiration: a bound prisoner escapes both from the Orcs and from the surrounding horsemen, stops in the open, cuts his bonds with an orc-knife, and then sits down and quietly eats some waybread—enough to show that he was a hobbit, without the mallorn-leaf. The observation captures the Hobbit essence: even in flight for their lives, they pause to eat, and their resourcefulness is inseparable from their homely appetites.

The Hobbits' Enduring Significance

The Hobbits' significance culminates in their role as the bearers of the Ring and, ultimately, as the witnesses to the new age. When Frodo, confronting a ruffian of Saruman in the Shire, declares that the Dark Tower has fallen, that there is a King in Gondor, and that Isengard has been destroyed, he speaks as a Hobbit who has passed through the great events and returned—and the contrast between his quiet authority and the ruffian's sneering ignorance measures how far the Hobbits have traveled from their provincial beginnings. The narrative's deepest claim is that the Hobbits, the smallest and most overlooked of the free peoples, are the ones who carry the fate of Middle-earth, and that their ordinary virtues—loyalty, endurance, a love of simple good things, and a refusal to be daunted—are the quiet foundation on which the victory over Sauron is built. Their story, from the long-expected party to the grey havens, is the story of how the humble and the homely become the heroic, and how the peace they love is won back for a world that nearly lost it.

The enormous popularity of Tolkien's work, largely thanks to The Lord of the Rings, expanded the demand for fantasy and caused the genre to flourish throughout the 1960s, continuing to the present day. This success spawned many imitations, such as The Sword of Shannara, which Lin Carter called "the single most cold-blooded, complete rip-off of another book that I have ever read," as well as alternate interpretations like The Last Ringbearer. The influence of hobbits extends beyond literature into gaming: Dungeons & Dragons, which popularized role-playing games in the 1970s, included halflings (based on hobbits) as a marketing move to draw on the work's popularity, according to lead designer Gary Gygax. This in turn influenced many later games, including Dragon Quest, EverQuest, the Warcraft series, and The Elder Scrolls series. The Legend of Zelda, which popularized action-adventure games in the 1980s, was also inspired by The Lord of the Rings among other fantasy works. Thus, hobbits have become a foundational archetype in modern fantasy, shaping both the literary and gaming landscapes.