What ain't there and ought to be.

[Child of the 7th Age]

Good question, Littlemanpoet! You've got me thinking again when I should be doing household chores.....

My own feeling is that this is a purposeful omission. As Kuruharan and Gurthang say, it's not so much a matter of being "scary" as that a cemetary just desn't fit into the overall depiction or tone that Tolkien gave us of the Shire.

In addition to the memorial that's already been mentioned, there actually was one brief reference to the internment of the 70 ruffians and 19 hobbits killed in the Battle of Bywater. This seems to imply that burial was the general rule for Hobbits, since it's mentioned so matter-of-factly:

The dead ruffians were laden on waggons and hauled off to an old sand-pit nearby and there buried: in the Battle Pit as it was afterwards called. The fallen hobbits were laid together in a grave on the hillside, where later a great stone was set up with a garden about it.

I am trying to remember if there are any mention of Hobbit burial customs or tombs in the books outside Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit--specifically Unfinished Tales, the Peoples of Middle-earth, and the four volumes of HoMe that cover the War of the Ring. I could be wrong, but I don't believe so.

I think there are reasons for this. First, the Shire and the Hobbits originated in the children's book The Hobbit . Tolkien added to this tapestry in the beginning chapters of the Lord of the Rings but he essentially did not change the tone of things he had established earlier. Cemetaries or burial customs certainly wouldn't have fit well in a children's book, and Tolkien does not change this pattern at the start of LotR. I am reminded of Tolkien's own short description of the Shire:

...an ordered district of government and business, the business of growing food and eating it and living in comparative peace and content.

The emphasis here is heavy on "living" in the sense of day to day activities, rather than anything larger. Indeed, the Hobbits are the one folk in the book who best exemplify the simple joys of everyday life.

Other people have commented that the Shire in the early chapters of the Lord of the Rings has a different "feel" about it than other places described later on in Middle-earth. (There is a thread about this that Littlemanpoet started.) Certainly, the Shire was more fanciful, a less somber and dangerous place than others in Middle-earth. There were no Orcs, no battles or hardships in recent memory, and even the weather had taken a milder turn. The reader knows the real reason for the Shire's "protection": its relative distance from the problems further east and, even more importantly, the guardianship of the Rangers. But the Hobbits themselves did not.

There is one other point that bears mentioning. I have always seen a very sharp contrast between the realm of Numenor and that of the Shire. Tolkien may not have done this intentionally, but it certainly comes over in the reading. The people of Numenor were preoccupied with death, those of the Shire preoccupied with living. Numenor built great tombs above the ground and had elaborate burial rituals, which were similar to those in Egypt according to the Letters. The Hobbits were exactly the opposite. They had no elaborate death rituals and the holes they built in the ground were for living and not for death. Hence, there are no cemetaries in the Shire. Interesting thought indeed, when one considers that JRRT's personal experience with a "hole in the ground" was that of the trenches of World War I, places of terrible evil, death, and destruction. Perhaps, in the years after the war, some part of his mind transformed these places of death into the Hobbit holes, which were essentially symbols of life, that we all know and love.

(Interestingly, you can make a similar comparison between Hobbit "living" versus Elvish "decay"and "embalming"....)

And I can think of one other thing that is missing from the Shire, which I believe was left out very intentionally by the author. The Hobbits have no long range memory. They are a people who have forgotten where they come from. Every people that I know preserves some kind of tale that describes their origin, either in the form of history or myth, but the Hobbits simply do not remember and do not seem to be curious to know. The reader is told that they originated about 1050 in the area of the Anduin, although the Hobbits themselves preserve only tiny hints of this distant past. Nothing is known before this date, either by the Hobbits or the reader.

Obviously, like other peoples of Middle-earth, the Hobbits must have been somewhere before 1050. So why doesn't Tolkien go into this when he carefully delineates the line of migration for all three Hobbit branches starting at the Anduin? I don't think it's just negligence. And I refuse to believe that Hobbits simply sprang from the ground in the year 1050. I can think of two possible reasons for their earlier absence. Hobbits aren't part of the Silm so it's easier to say their early history is forgotten. that way there is no need to rewrite the earlier Legendarium, which Tolkien was frequently trying to do. Yet, in actuality, Tolkien really wouldn't have had to rewrite Silm since he covers himself by saying that the Elvish sources simply weren't concerned about Hobbits.

Perhaps it is more than that, and Hobbit history had to be forgotten. If Sauron had been aware of hobbits from his sojourn in Numenor or snooping about in Beleriand or in some other context, he would have been more cognizant of where they lived. He would have realized from the outset that they were a small people and easy to enslave, and would have been able to get to the Shire more easily and capture the elusive "Baggins". So perhaps Hobbit amnesia was a protective device, shielding them from prying eyes and making it possible for Gandalf to choose someone to carry the Ring whom Sauron would be less likely to suspect.

[mark12_30]

And I refuse to believe that Hobbits simply sprang from the ground in the year 1050.

Aule got bored again and created more cave-dwellers, but this time made them cute and harmless so his wife would complain less.

[littlemanpoet]

Gurthang:

...no ... large police force ...

Maybe not large, but there were the shiriffs.

Lalwendë:

Rohan for example does not appear to have a structure in place for trade, which may tie in with its feudal nature, but as Anglo-Saxon society had this, I would have expected to see it in Rohan.

Well, Anglo-Saxon society was technically not feudal. It may have had feudal aspects, but it was the Normans that brought thoroughgoing feudalism to England (another reason why Tolkien considered 1066 to be such a disaster?). Feudalism was a post-Roman Imperial economic and political phenomenon, whereas the Anglo-Saxon liege-earl relationship had its roots in prehistoric Nordic patterns. Heorot in Beowulf is the best exemplar of this. Anyway, a reader may assume that Rohan had everything that Anglo-Saxon society had, just as one may assume that the Shire had everything one might expect of 1800s Oxfordshire (including graveyards).

I'm with Kuruharan in thinking of cemeteries as not scary places. However, whereas Kuruharan mentions sadness, I like Child's reminder of the historic component of cemeteries. Monuments are built right into what a cemetery is, including dates. My wife and I often stop at a cemetery and walk around, just to get a sense of the names of those who inhabited the regoin, and their dates. The Hobbits' lack of historic depth is another "ain't there and ought to be", although the "ought to be" is debatable.

Child, The Hobbits' penchant for living is something I had thought of before I started the thread, but I wanted to see what others said.

They had no elaborate death rituals and the holes they built in the ground were for living and not for death. Hence, there are no cemetaries in the Shire. Interesting thought indeed, when one considers that JRRT's personal experience with a "hole in the ground" was that of the trenches of World War I, places of terrible evil, death, and destruction. Perhaps, in the years after the war, some part of his mind transformed these places of death into the Hobbit holes, which were essentially symbols of life, that we all know and love.

I would have to reply that your "perhaps" is too sieve-like. My own thought runs along the line that Hobbits are (in part) Tolkien's exemplars of humans who are at home being animals/animals who are at home being human. I can't think of a better way to put it. Tolkien calls them a sub-species of humans; these have furry feet, eat constantly, are quick and quiet (in order to avoid Big People), live in holes, and are largely oblivious to things beyond their own small realms. These are all characteristics of animals (and some humans!); and these "animals" are at home being human, loving their beer, baths, gardens, a clean front hallway, are millers, farmers, ostlers, etc. All of that to make the point that Hobbit holes have more to do with the character of hobbits as created by Tolkien than any subconscious reference to World War One trenches.

I do think that your point, contrasting Numenoreans's death-obsession with Hobbits' passion for life, is quite apt.

Perhaps it is more than that, and Hobbit history had to be forgotten.

Talk about seeing things from the author's point of view! I can't help wondering if this is overstated, though.

mark 12_30:

Aule got bored again and created more cave-dwellers, but this time made them cute and harmless so his wife would complain less.

[Child of the 7th Age]

that Hobbits are (in part) Tolkien's exemplars of humans who are at home being animals/animals who are at home being human.

Hmm...interesting. I think I can go along with this as long as I see the qualifier: the words "in part". I don't think the later experiences of Sam and Frodo, or even of Merry and Pippin, fit well under this rubric if it's applied too narrowly. Surely they have gone beyond this.

I also have another question. If we accept the definition you've given above for Hobbits, then what does it say about us as humans, or even about JRRT? At one point, the author himself said something to the effect that "I am in part a hobbit". Are we saying that the animal part is an important piece of us? Perhaps, we're not just Elves, driven by the desire to subcreate or embalm, and that we ignore the Hobbit or animal part (in a positive sense) at our own peril. Perhaps, despite the narrowness and parochialism that limits the Hobbit mind, we can not be a full human without it. After all, in one footnote in the Letters, Tolkien clearly said that all the different races--Elf, Dwarf, Hobbit--were simply different pieces of the human mind. If that is so, and the Hobbit is an "animal", what does it say about us?

But are we actually so sure about this animal/Hobbit equivalency? At one point JRRT furiously denied that the Hobbits were the equivalent of "rabbits". I know there is another recent theory set down on paper that Hobbits actually resemble badgers more closely. This is discussed in The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien , by Lewis and Currie, which is a book I'd love to read but it's only available in the UK, and, even there, it seems hard to get hold of. I believe that Davem owns this work so he may have some knowledge of this argument.

And despite your skepticism, I still can't help thinking that JRRT's personal experiences crawling around in muddy holes in WWI bore some relation to Hobbit holes, if only in the sense of transforming a terrible experience into something far different. Of course, there's another way to look at this, which deals neither with my WWI trenches or your animal holes in the ground. Many of the faerie folk live inside hills. Indeed, this was said of the Sidhe who were said to hide inside hollow hills. Knowing the layer upon layer of meaning in JRRT's mind, I would rather think that all three of these factors had some part to play in the evolution of the Hobbit hole.

Regarding Hobbit history.... I do think there is a mysterious absence of it. Can it be explained solely by the lack of memory typically shown by the animal? I just don't think so once you bring Frodo and Bilbo into the equation. Bilbo spent most of his life gathering and translating tales of the Elvish past, going far back in time, but not one word is said about the existence of Hobbits before 1050. That can't be coincidence.

I am admittedly thinking out loud in this post and floundering for answers, but I believe there are implications here that go beyond what you've suggested.

[Lalwendë]

This is interesting - why do Hobbits live in Hobbit holes and what does it mean? Firstly, I have to point out that not all Hobbits live in smials, and surely the practice would eventually become more obsolete as the population of The Shire grew and it became harder to find suitable hole delving 'real estate'?

I like Child's idea of the smial being developed from Tolkien's experiences in the trenches, but I'd like to turn it around a little and look at a hole in the ground as being a place of safety. During trench warfare, the 'hole in the ground' would be the only relatively safe place to be. It was above ground that the real dangers lurked. And smials are not deep holes, they are not like the tunnels of the Dwarves and Orcs, they have windows and while snug and safe, they are also close to the surface. The dangerous tunnels might be like those seen in Birdsong, dug deep beneath the trenches for the purposes of undermining the enemy front lines. So, perhaps Tolkien saw the smial as emblematic of relative safety.

Many of the faerie folk live inside hills

There is definitely something interesting in this, and rather than Hobbits being animal, I think they are far more faerie. They are slightly, but not completely, hidden in their smials. They are in effect camouflaged; like inhabitants of faerie, we can see them if we try just hard enough to look beyond what we expect to see (i.e. just a hill), and they are always there. If we don't allow oursleves to 'see' then we will not notice them, rather like Sauron fails to notice the existence of Hobbits, as he is unable to make himself open to the possibility. In some ways, Hobbits are more like the inhabitants of Faerie than the Elves are. They are more linked with our folklore, and more like us, like another aspect of us.

[littlemanpoet]

I'm going to have to start a new thread, because this idea of mythic unity goes way beyond the scope of this one. But just to give you a clue as to what I'm talking about, I think that Tolkien achieved a lot of mythic unities in LotR. That is to say, he re-combined things in various races that had gotten pulled from each other. I'll get into more detail in the new thread.

Lalwendë, you've hinted at it with your conception that hobbits are more like faeries than animals. I would agree with you, except that I would state it thusly: hobbits' faerie nature partakes (in part) of a fascinating combination of humanity and animality.

Child, yes, I think the animality/humanity of hobbits says a lot about us, and I tend to think that JRRT knew exactly what he was getting at with it.

I still think that the WW1 trenches have more to do with Tolkien's Mordor than the Shire.

And I agree that the five primary hobbits do go beyond the animality/humanity unity; after all, they are the main characters! They would have to. Nevertheless, Samwise never loses the unity. Being a happily married gardener (and mayor) is all about the animality of being human. Onto that new thread!

[Child of the 7th Age]

Lalwende - You may be right on the idea of the "comparative safety" of the trench at least when considering the alternatives that JRRT would have had! In reality, however, they were muddy and unsanitary and unpleasant places!

Littlemanpoet -

I'll definitely take a look at that "new" thread..... after I get my chores done .

I did drop a note to Davem regarding the question of Hobbits as badgers and am hoping he'll drop by to give us more clarification on that idea. I've been told by several friends in the UK that it's an interesting book and an intriguing argument, though it is all conjecture rather than hard fact.

~Child