View Single Post
Old 12-10-2009, 03:05 AM   #40
skip spence
shadow of a doubt
 
skip spence's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Back on the streets
Posts: 1,127
skip spence is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.skip spence is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Tolkien, as an avid pipe-smoker, thought of the habit as a pleasurable pastime, not as a repulsive and immoral means of slowly killing yourself while making everyone in the close proximity suffer horribly too. Apparently and not coincidently Hobbits did likewise.

Did they die from lung cancer at times? Considering that their pipe-weed was indeed tobacco, or something very much like it, and that Hobbits biologically are just little people, well, some of them probably did. They wouldn't be aware that is was cancer they died from though, why they had contracted it, or indeed what cancer was in the first place, so they had no reason to worry.
__________________
"You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way" ~ Bob Dylan
skip spence is offline   Reply With Quote