Brown-skinned hobbits?
Thursday, June 8th, 2006 08:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerDipping 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.
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.
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Date: 2006-06-08 10:59 am (UTC)Incidentally, I did quite a double take when I went into Borders a couple of years ago and saw "Author of the Century - Tom Shippey" on one of the shelves. Then I realised it wasn't his autobiography after all.
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Date: 2006-06-08 11:07 am (UTC)I'm reading that book at the moment - it's pretty good. It intrigues me that Tom is such a Tolkien fan, given his rather low opinion of fantasy in general.
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Date: 2006-06-08 12:12 pm (UTC)I don't think there is much fantasy around with the kind of depth that is in Tolkien. For most of us it's just a big fantasy that you can get lost in with lots of details that you don't really bother following (and that many people find make it very hard going), but those details do stand up to very close academic study.
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Date: 2006-06-09 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-09 06:24 pm (UTC)TSnUyFpJIPav
Date: 2007-05-19 05:54 am (UTC)