[Child of the 7th Age]

I was poking around and found some additional articles through a link that Mark12_30 provided down in Mirth. Take a look at this quotation that discusses the possibility that remnents of these folk may have survived much closer to our day....

Bert Roberts, of the University of Wollongong, whose team carried out the dating, said there were a lot of detailed folk tales on Flores about little people.

"These stories suggest there may be more than a grain of truth to the idea that they were still living on Flores up until the Dutch arrived in the 1500s," Professor Roberts said. "The stories suggest they lived in caves. The villagers would leave gourds with food out for them to eat, but legend has it these were the guests from hell. They'd eat everything, including the gourds."

I guess Hobbits had big appetites, just as Tolkien said.

Actually, when I read this, my heart dropped down into my toes. The idea that there could be this much diversity on our earth in human memory is astounding to me: that little and big folk may actually have coexisted, with the big folk scarcely aware of the other's existence. That scenario sounds eerily like Tolkien:

Even in ancient days they were, as a rule, shy of 'the Big Folk', as they call us, and now they avoid us with dismay, and are becoming hard to find.

OK, I am going to raise an idea here that is probably preposturous. Yet I can't help wondering.... Many cultures have stories of little folk leading a secluded life alongside the big folk, but largely hidden from view. They are given many different names, but the idea is widespread.

Do we have some kind of a collective memory that taps into what happened in the distant past? Some kind of radar that could take a people that really existed and make them part of a folk memory? And is it possible that some people are better at this than others.....they are sensitive to these distant memories in a way that others are not? Could Tolkien be someone with a special gift: the gift of reconnecting with archetypes that once really existed in some form or fashion and make up part of our human past? Is this one of the things we sense when we read his works?

Two more points mentioned in other articles. One scientist speculates on why the human population on Flores might have tended to favor those who were small in size:

On Flores the only predator was the komodo dragon and the tropical rainforest provided little food for people. "Under these conditions selection should favour the reduced energy requirements of smaller individuals," Professor Brown said.

Another suggests thereason why the small people probably died out about 12,000 years ago: they were killed by volcanic activity.

A layer of volcanic ash above the skeletons, dated to about 12,000 years ago, suggests that volcanic activity led to the demise of the little people and the pygmy elephants they hunted, the Australian and Indonesian team says.

Shades of Mordor!