**Spoiler Warning** Rings of Power S1E1 - "A Shadow of the Past"

[Tar Elenion]

Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc

The Good: Stone Age Hobbits: 9/10

And then the Stone Age Proto-Hobbits can WRITE. Yes! This is the screenwriters READING and PAYING ATTENTION to the original. Because the Hobbits' affinity for books is somewhat counterintuitive (merry, simple farmers, or in this case gatherers, are not what you'd associate with literacy as one of their chief values), it would be easy to miss this one. But look! They have books AND their own proto-script! If Tolkien the linguist were to cheer at anything, I daresay it would be this. Well done!

This is another place where the showrunners were not paying any attention (unless it was another one of those 'well we went back to the books and we felt that was what Tolkien wanted' despite what Tolkien said).

"Of their original home the Hobbits in Bilbo’s time preserved no knowledge. A love of learning (other than genealogical lore) was far from general among them, but there remained still a few in the older families who studied their own books, and even gathered reports of old times and distant lands from Elves, Dwarves, and Men. Their own records began only after the settlement of the Shire, and their most ancient legends hardly looked further back than their Wandering Days."
LotR, Prologue

Hobbits were illiterate until ca. TA 1300:
"It was soon after their learning of letters, about Third Age 1300, that Hobbits began to set down and collect the considerable store of tales and legends and oral annals and genealogies that they already possessed."
PoMe, Appendix on Languages

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

Why "Harfoot"? What was wrong with "holbytla"?

They were not yet sedentary enough to become hole-dwellers, and hairy feet are the one thing common to all kinds of Hobbit throughout history.

Originally Posted by Michael Murry

Formendacil: "WHY the giant antlers? A Thranduil-call sideways?"

Thank you so much for that. When I told my Taiwanese wife about it, she had the same reaction we both did to Thranduil and his absurd choice of ride in The Hobbit: "You call yourself a Wood Elf? How do you expect to get through the forest with those monstrous wardrobe racks catching on every tree trunk and branch along the way?"

I take it they were using the antlers as camouflage: the animals they were hunting, who would only have seen the antlers above the high grass, would have taken them for browsing deer and not become alarmed. I've seen historical depictions of Native American's using the same deceit, although with less humongous palms. Also they were hunting in a lightly forested prairie of grass and shrubs, so the huge antlers are more defensible in their case than in Thranduil's (still impractical, of course).

Originally Posted by Tar Elenion

This is another place where the showrunners were not paying any attention (unless it was another one of those 'well we went back to the books and we felt that was what Tolkien wanted' despite what Tolkien said).

"Of their original home the Hobbits in Bilbo’s time preserved no knowledge. A love of learning (other than genealogical lore) was far from general among them, but there remained still a few in the older families who studied their own books, and even gathered reports of old times and distant lands from Elves, Dwarves, and Men. Their own records began only after the settlement of the Shire, and their most ancient legends hardly looked further back than their Wandering Days."
LotR, Prologue

Hobbits were illiterate until ca. TA 1300:
"It was soon after their learning of letters, about Third Age 1300, that Hobbits began to set down and collect the considerable store of tales and legends and oral annals and genealogies that they already possessed."
PoMe, Appendix on Languages

Well, love of learning was far from general among the Harfeet we see in RoP - it was only Sadoc, the cunning man/druid/historian of the tribe who could read (and write) the chronicles, and what we see on their pages are more pictograms than any kind of syllabic or alphabetic script. Also I think it's safe to assume that most of what was in Sadoc's book would have been largely lost and forgotten by the time the Hobbits arrived in the Shire.

[Tar Elenion]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

Well, love of learning was far from general among the Harfeet we see in RoP - it was only Sadoc, the cunning man/druid/historian of the tribe who could read (and write) the chronicles, and what we see on their pages are more pictograms than any kind of syllabic or alphabetic script. Also I think it's safe to assume that most of what was in Sadoc's book would have been largely lost and forgotten by the time the Hobbits arrived in the Shire.

No. I think it is much better to take what Tolkien said about his own mythology.
Particularly when I was replying to a statement about how it showed they were "READING and PAYING ATTENTION to the original", i.e. Tolkien, and I supplied what Tolkien said, showing they were not reading and paying attention.