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| Arriving to Hobbiton |
Claire Fontaine is a great fan of J.R.R.Tolkien and she's very excited today because they have visited Hobitton, the world of the Hobbits.
During the travel to this curious place, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her First Certificate Language Practice manual (Grammar 9).
More information: Passives
Hobbits are a fictional, diminutive, humanoid race who inhabit the lands of Middle-earth in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction. They are also referred to as Halflings.
Hobbits first appeared in the novel The Hobbit, whose titular hobbit is the protagonist Bilbo Baggins. The novel The Lord of the Rings includes as major characters the hobbits Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took, and Meriadoc Brandybuck, as well as several other minor hobbit characters. Hobbits are also briefly mentioned in The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.
According to the author in the prologue to The Lord of the Rings, hobbits are relatives of the race of Men. Elsewhere, Tolkien describes Hobbits as a variety or separate branch of humans. Within the story, hobbits and other races seem aware of the similarities, hence the colloquial terms Big People and Little People used in Bree. Hobbits considered themselves a separate people.
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| Claire Fontaine visits Hobbiton |
At the time of the events in The Lord of the Rings, hobbits lived in the Shire and in Bree in the north west of Middle-earth, though by the end, some had moved out to the Tower Hills and to Gondor and Rohan.
Tolkien believed he had invented the word hobbit as a speculative derivation from Old English when he began writing The Hobbit, it was revealed years after his death that the word predated Tolkien's usage, though with a different meaning.
Tolkien's concept of hobbits, in turn, seems to have been inspired by Edward Wyke Smith's 1927 children's book The Marvellous Land of Snergs, and by Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel Babbitt.
The Snergs were, in Tolkien's words, a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and have the strength of ten men. Tolkien wrote to W.H. Auden that The Marvellous Land of Snergs was probably an unconscious source-book for the Hobbits and he told an interviewer that the word hobbit might have been associated with Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, like hobbits, George Babbitt enjoys the comforts of his home.
More information: Hobbiton Tours
However, Tolkien claims that he started The Hobbit suddenly, without premeditation, in the midst of grading a set of student essay exams, writing on a blank piece of paper: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. While The Hobbit introduced this comfortable race to the world, it is only in writing The Lord of the Rings that Tolkien developed details of their history and wider society.
He set out a fictional etymology for the name in an appendix to The Lord of the Rings, to the effect that it was ultimately derived from holbytla, plural holbytlan, meaning hole-builder and corresponding to Old English.
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| The Hobbit's Cast |
In the language of the Rohirrim the hobbits were called kûd-dûkan, which had rendered the autonym kuduk.
In the prologue to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes that hobbits are between two and four feet, 0.61–1.22 m, tall, the average height being three feet six inches, 107 cm. They dress in bright colours, favouring yellow and green. Nowadays, according to Tolkien's fiction, they are usually shy, but are nevertheless capable of great courage and amazing feats under the proper circumstances.
They are adept at
throwing stones. For the most part, they cannot grow beards, but a few
of the race of Stoor can. Their feet are covered with curly hair,
usually brown, as is the hair on their heads, with leathery soles, so
hobbits hardly ever wear shoes. The race's average life expectancy is
100 years. Two Hobbits, Bilbo Baggins and the Old Took, are described as living to the age of 130 or beyond, though Bilbo's long lifespan owes much to his possession of the One Ring.
More information: Tolkien Gateway
Hobbits are considered to come of age on their 33rd birthday, so a 50-year-old hobbit would be regarded as entering middle-age. Hobbits are not quite as stocky as the similarly-sized dwarves, but still tend to be stout, with slightly pointed ears. Tolkien does not describe hobbits' ears in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, but in a 1938 letter to his American publisher, he described them as having ears only slightly pointed and elvish.
In his writings, Tolkien
depicted hobbits as fond of an unadventurous, bucolic and simple life
of farming, eating, and socializing, although capable of defending their
homes courageously if the need arises. They would enjoy six meals a
day, if they could get them.
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| Joseph & The Grandma visit Hobbiton |
They were often described as enjoying simple food, though this seems to be of an Oxfordshire style, such as cake, bread, meat, potatoes, ale and tea. They claim to have invented the art of smoking pipe-weed, and according to The Hobbit and The Return of The King it can be found all over Middle-earth.
In their earliest folk tales Hobbits appear to have inhabited the Valley of Anduin, between Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains. According to The Lord of the Rings, they have lost the genealogical details of how they are related to the Big People. At this time, there were three breeds of hobbits, with different physical characteristics and temperaments: Harfoots, Stoors and Fallohides.
While situated in the valley of the Anduin River, the hobbits lived close by the Éothéod, the ancestors of the Rohirrim, and this led to some contact between the two. As a result, many old words and names in Hobbitish are derivatives of words in Rohirric.
The Harfoots, the most numerous, were almost identical to the Hobbits as they are described in The Hobbit. They lived on the lowest slopes of the Misty Mountains and lived in holes, or Smials, dug into the hillsides.
The Stoors, the second most numerous, were shorter and stockier and had an affinity for water, boats and swimming. They lived on the marshy Gladden Fields where the Gladden River met the Anduin, there is a similarity here to the hobbits of Buckland and the Marish in the Shire. It is possible that those hobbits were the descendants of Stoors. It was from these Hobbits that Déagol and Sméagol/Gollum were descended.
That was the big effect Lord of the Rings had on me.
It was discovering New Zealand.
And even more precious were the people,
not at all like the Australians.
Ian Mckellen
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