What are your neighbours like?
 

Okay... i hope you do not mind another thread about this topic... which characters/which race are your neighbours most like?

My neighbours are hobbits (i am pretty sure about that).. they love to eat, love to drink, they love to smoke (well cigarettes, not pipes)... they do not like trouble or adventures or people who are different.

I am from a small village in germany by the way. I think somewhere i have red, that Tolkien wanted the hobbits to be like the rural population in England...

Sadly one lot of next door neighbours are headed up by a man who's like a foul, snivelling Orc. We found a smashed beer bottle in the back garden a while back, he swears like a drunken docker and he had a temper tantrum last week when davem tried to take the bin out around the back. He kicked a football at my head last summer for letting some water run under his gate. He's a truly vile man.

However I have some very nice neighbours too - one of them has just given me lots of nice blankets, some bottles and a moses basket - with her large brood crammed into a tiny house she's more like a Hobbit. :)

Mine are like the Drúedain. Reclusive and unfriendly.

Notably, Tolkien may have based some ideas of hobbits on the citizens of Kentucky:

Tolkien's Ol' Kentucky Hole?

Hobbits in Kentucky

I went to internet phone books and found no entries for Baggins, Tooks or Bracegirdles, no Brandybucks (there's a Meriadoc Brandybuck living in Florida, though!), but several Burrows and Grubbs and a few Proudfoots.

I live in the Shire!
 

Where I live has got to be the most hobbit-like place on earth - Exmoor. Heather-clad moorland, gentle rolling countryside, which has yet to be spoiled by motorways, sodium lights, crime or city-living.

My husband's family are very similar to Farmer Maggot's: a comfortable old farmhouse with a big open fireplace in the kitchen, one or two workers who turn up at meal times, dogs gnawing bones by the fire. They don't grow mushrooms though...

My husband's two closest friends are like Merry & Pippin, two young bachelors who like their beer and travelling round the local pubs.

Our local pubs could be settings for the Prancing Pony, the Green Dragon or the Golden Perch - very old pubs that haven't changed much for hundreds of years.

We have real barrows. Can't say I feel particularly frightened when I'm standing by one. I walk past one every day when I walk my dogs during my lunch break, if it's foggy out i try and imagine the Barrow Downs. Haven't seen anything scary yet, although I keep hoping.

There is a Meriadoc Brandybuck living in Florida? Poor wretch! I guess people are phoninmg him up all the time. There is a Patricia (i think it was Patricia) Gamgee living in Germany. She was interviewed for German television (just when RotK started in the cinemas). She said she had to get herself a secret phone number, because so many people phoned her.

I went to a lecture on this topic at Birmingham 2005. The guy who gave it (can't remember his name but he was truly impressive, a huge American bloke with a beard and big belly and who played a They Might Be Giants song on his keyboard - totally eccentric) reckoned there wasn't anything in the idea in particular as a lot of the names crop up elsewhere in similar numbers too.

I went to school with some Bilbos and I work with a Proudfoot. Took is a fairly common name in the UK too.

Well, I have my uncle and aunt next-door, clearly Sackville-Bagginses (they really are).
My grandfather probably a Hobbit, something like the old Proudfoot in the movie.
Some Dwarves next door, since the guy is really good at building stuff
Probably Elves on the other side of the road cause all I hear from there is piano music.
And the rest are pretty much Dunlendings who always complain after my outdoor-parties.