Brown-skinned hobbits?

Dipping into Patrick Curry’s Defending Middle Earth, I came across the parenthetical comment “Incidentally, the hobbits appear to be brown-skinned, not white.” This is interesting, not just because, if true, it would be one important detail that Peter Jackson (and pretty much everybody else) got wrong, but also because it would add an interesting twist to the corny “Was Tolkien racist?” arguments.

Ever since I first listened to The Hobbit as a bed-time story, I’d assumed that hobbits were white. In fact, I assumed this of all the races of Middle Earth who weren’t specifically described otherwise, with the exception of the people of Gondor, who I thought of as olive-skinned, since I vaguely associated them with Romans (an association which Tolkien himself may also have made, though in his case Minas Tirith might well have been the Rome of the popes rather than the Caesars). This is only natural, since (a) I am white, and thus tend unthinkingly to picture characters I identify with as looking rather like myself, and (b) Middle Earth, as Tolkien repeatedly pointed out, is based on the mythology of North-Western Europe. While The Lord of the Rings has achieved international popularity, it is no more an attempt to create a universal myth than was the Kalevala or Journey to the West.

So, if Tolkien really did conceive of his hobbits as brown rather than white, he must have had a reason. Hobbits aren’t just European, they are very, very English: the Shire is famous as an affectionate parody of rural England. Why, then, give them brown skins? It is just about conceivable that Tolkien was deliberately trying to avoid association with the perversion of “Nordic” mythology by the likes of “that ruddy ignoramus” Adolf Hitler. But a more plausible reason might be that he was not trying to make the hobbits less “Nordic” (scare-quotes because Tolkien himself hated the term) but to make them more rural. English folklore is replete with descriptions of country folk as “brown”—think, for example, of the folk song “Bonny Brown Girl”. And of course, this would place hobbits outside the aristocratic aura that emanates from all elves and most humans in the story.

Anyway, I would be grateful if any Tolkien buffs out there could provide me with a textual reference for hobbit skins.

Recruiting

Since a large number of my readers seem to be involved in academia in some way or another, I thought I’d mention that our department is recruiting at the moment. A few points of information:

• The school is an English-medium university in Ankara.
• Most of the classes involve teaching academic skills (with an emphasis on writing) to first-year undergraduates, though there are more specialist courses at other levels. (I usually teach two classes of first years and one class of either second years or postgrads.) Because the students are not native speakers, there is more language teaching involved than in your typical Freshman Comp course.
• We normally teach 13–15 hours per week to three classes of between 15 and 25 students, and are also expected to give tutorials and spend a lot of time reading papers.
• Students’ academic ability and level of English vary. They are generally very friendly and polite, though of course you find the occasional exception.
• Most courses use content-based instruction, which means that there is no textbook—you supply the content yourself. This involves a fair amount of work, but has the advantage that you can spend time reading and talking about anything that interests you and call it work; for example, I've done courses on the Matrix films, monsters and games.
• Since it’s in Turkey, pay is not wonderful, but there are plenty of fringe benefits, such as accomodation on campus and free transport into the city.
• Some teaching experience is essential, and experience of teaching non-native speakers is preferred. Your first degree doesn’t need to be in English, but an MA is pretty much essential (any subject, though English, Linguistics, Education or TESOL are preferred). A higher TEFL/TESOL qualification like the DELTA may be an acceptable substitute for an MA.

All in all, it’s not the chair at Oxford you’ve been dreaming of, but it’s better than most adjunct jobs, so if you’re interested, leave a comment (and feel free to cross-post this to any suitable communities).