Do Hobbits get Lung Cancer?

[TheGreatElvenWarrior]

Okay,I was talking with my friend (who also has an account on the Downs) About Hobbits and how they smoke. She said that they must get lung cancer or something from smoking so much, but I don't know because it is written

Hobbits live to be One Hundred as often as not.

So we were confused and would like some answers!

[Nazgûl-king]

I never thought of that, neither the books nor the films ever mention anyone getting lung cancer, maybe the Hobbits are immune to it.

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

You know the so-called "Churchill syndrome"? People with that can smoke like a factory and nothing happens to them. Maybe the whole Hobbit race had this.

Or, maybe Old Toby cultivated some sort of pipeweed that was not harmful in any way.

(Gandalf and Saruman also were smoking quite a lot and we never see a scene like "Théoden, my friend, let us forget old *cough cough* sorry, Théoden, join me *cough cough cough* oh no, the Voice ain't working today. Worm, throw the Palantír on them at once!"
Though, Gandalf and Saruman were Istari - they could have had some resistance. But what about the Rangers? Well, they were Dúnedain, so maybe... The Dwarves? No problem, Dwarves are tough. Okay, so the only people who could have had problems would be the Breelanders. Like Bill Ferny. At least he was spitting all over the place. If it was due to the pipeweed, we don't know. But if yes, then that implies that sometimes smoking was not as pleasant. But that does not necessarily prove anything. Maybe his pipe was just a bad one.)

[Aganzir]

At least American Indians, who had been harvesting tobacco for a long time before the Europeans came, suffered less from the side-effects of tobacco than the Europeans. I don't know about Hobbits though- if I remember correctly, smoking pipeweed was a relatively new practice among them, so the immunity should have developed in a very short time.

But hobbits are quite tough. If even the Ring didn't affect them as strongly as it would have some other race, maybe smoking pipeweed caused no problem either.

[Mithalwen]

Hard as it may be to believe now but there was a time when cigarettes were sold almost as health products

http://indymotorspeedway.com/cigs/1930s.html


Tolkien was a great smoker and this was not regarded as anthing unusual. At the time the books were written the tobacco use would not have been remarkable. However to put a modern perspective on it Hobbits are "tough in the fibre" and like Numenoreans they don't seem prone to illness generally - premature deaths tend to be accidental.

But remember children, Elves don't smoke and they live forever and don't get wrinkles..... a lesson for us all?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

In the 1940s the link between smoking and lung cancer was little understood, and even what the medical research community may have suspected wasn't widely known outside. Tolkien's own doctor and fellow-Inkling 'Humphrey' Havard was himself a heavy smoker.

Remember also that Hobbits (and Tolkien) smoked pipes, which ordinarily do not involve inhaling and in fact pipe-smoking is not generally linked to lung cancer....just cancer of the mouth and lips. In any event, Tolkien himself for all his tobacco use lived to a ripe old age and ultimately died of a stomach ulcer. Cigarette smoking creates a very elevated risk of lung cancer, but it is not by any means automatic or guaranteed that a smoker will develop it!

[William Cloud Hicklin]

like Numenoreans they don't seem prone to illness generally - premature deaths tend to be accidental.

I'm not so sure- after all, both Hobbits and Dunedain were badly affected by the Great Plague.

[Nazgûl-king]

I wonder if perhaps the leaves the hobbits used for smoking have any medical properties, if so maybe that is why they did not get lung cancer as perhaps it was actually healthy for them to smoke. Though I kind of doubt it, but I thought I would put it out there.

[Mugwump]

The cancer risk from pipe smoking is much less than for cigarettes, perhaps because the smoke is generally not inhaled. In America, with a population of over 300 million, there are an estimated 1000 or so cancer deaths (all kinds, not just lung cancer) per year attributed to pipe smoking. That's about one death per 300,000 people in the population (a much smaller number smoked pipes, of course). Although it's not politically correct to say so, perhaps pipe smoking just isn't all that dangerous.

Besides which, we don't know much about hobbits' smoking habits. We don't know how often they smoked, whether or not they inhaled, or even whether their "pipe weed" was even tobacco! We also don't know whether hobbits had a greater resistance to diseases like cancer than humans have.

In fact, if we can accept the existence of Balrogs in Middle Earth, then why couldn't we accept the existence of pipe weed smoking that doesn't cause any kind of cancer? If Tolkien did not put lung cancer into his world, then why should we assume it exists there!

[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by Mugwump

In fact, if we can accept the existence of Balrogs in Middle Earth, then why couldn't we accept the existence of pipe weed smoking that doesn't cause any kind of cancer? If Tolkien did not put lung cancer into his world, then why should we assume it exists there!

So the real question then, is: Do Balrogs cause cancer? It's not as far-fetched as all that really. Where there's smoke, there's fire--and there's a lot of fire in a Balrog.

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Mugwump

The cancer risk from pipe smoking is much less than for cigarettes, perhaps because the smoke is generally not inhaled. In America, with a population of over 300 million, there are an estimated 1000 or so cancer deaths (all kinds, not just lung cancer) per year. That's about one death per 300,000 people. Although it's not politically correct to say so, perhaps pipe smoking just isn't all that dangerous.

Where did you get that statistic of 1000 estimated deaths per year in the US, Mugwump?

The stats given by the American Cancer Society for 2008 read 565,650 deaths from all cancers.

And the cancer risk for pipe smoking includes oral cancers, not just lung cancer.

Formendacil, I can see the start of a new controversy: would Balrog cigarettes have filters or not?

[Mugwump]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Where did you get that statistic of 1000 estimated deaths per year in the US, Mugwump?

The stats given by the American Cancer Society for 2008 read 565,650 deaths from all cancers.

And the cancer risk for pipe smoking includes oral cancers, not just lung cancer.

Sorry, I didn't finish the sentence correctly:

In America, with a population of over 300 million, there are an estimated 1000 or so cancer deaths (all kinds, not just lung cancer) per year among pipe smokers.

That statistic is from a 1996 study published in the journal Preventive Medicine, which estimated that the number of deaths in the United States attributable to pipe smoking in 1991 ranged from 650 to 2,820, the majority from lung cancer, but that number included all types of cancers the pipe smokers died from. The middle estimate was a little more than 1,000 deaths.

By the way, I once tried smoking a pipe. It make my throat so raw and painfull I never tried again.

[skip spence]

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.