Quote:
Originally Posted by Mnemosyne
Ehh...
I can only see a superficial relationship between soddies and hobbit holes.
The most obvious difference is that soddies were made because the American settlers were out on the Great Plains, where the land is flat as a pancake, because there were no trees; whereas hobbits had hills to burrow their way into.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, a sodhouse was made by chopping blocks of dirt (the very thick root system of the native grasses of the American Great Plains helped keep the sod together) out of the ground and then using them as bricks to make walls around the area you dug the sod from. So a sodhouse is slightly underground as you keep on chopping more chunks of dirt out.
Hobbit burrows may have started out more similar to this by being mere rooms dug straight into the earth (so you get dirt floors and walls), but the ones that we're familiar with managed to go past that by adding the amenities of wood paneling on the inside (if a Plains pioneer could afford wood, s/he would simply build a wooden house). Given Tolkien's introduction to holes as not being wet or smelly in The Hobbit it's safe to assume that there was some kind of civilizing interior added to most holes by the end of the Third Age; on the other hand when the hobbits dismantle Sharkey's inns and use the bricks to make some holes snugger or drier these methods couldn't have been foolproof, especially for the poorer families.
But there is one thing I've learned through studying the sodhouses: dirt is a great insulator, keeping the house (or hole) cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. Which seems like just the right kind of logic that hobbits would like.
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Thanks for clearing that up, as I think I already said, I couldn't quite remember, it's been probably nine or so years since I read those... or rather had them sort of read to me (because my mum would read to me, but I'd be a page ahead of her because she was too slow).