Hey, I have a question about your last reblog? You wrote in the tags that book!hobbits have brown skin, and I could have **sworn** I remembered that, too, but when I went looking, I couldn't find anything about it? Can you help me out with that? (No worries if you can't/don't want to! I totally understand. Also I feel like I should mention somewhere in here that I really love your art.)
i was really hoping somebody would ask this so i am prepared. watch me dance
here’s just a list of every instance that a hobbit (usually sam) is mentioned being brown of skin:
in the hobbit:‘…(hobbits) have long clever brown fingers…’
in the lord of the rings:'The Harfoots were browner of skin…’’(Sam’s) brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword.’'…upon (Frodo’s) white forehead lay one of Sam’s brown hands, …’'…(Sam’s) faithful brown hobbit-hand…’
that’s what i got from sweeping an ebook with ‘brown’, but there could very well be other instances using different words, i just don’t remember any of them.
EDIT: and yes yes, i am aware of the fact that brown hands mean a worker’s hands in tolkien’s time. but read on.
now the three original hobbit-breeds were the Harfoots, the Stoors, and the Fallohides. these breeds are long past being distinct any more, but we do know that the Harfoots were the most populous and widespread and that most hobbits in the third age are mostly of Harfoot-blood, except for a few particular families who are mentioned as having a good deal of Fallohide, like the Tooks and Brandybucks. (i would also argue that, being river-folk, the Brandybucks have a fair amount of Stoor blood in them as well.)
the Fallohides, as their name would suggest, are described as being ‘fairer of skin and also of hair’, so one can easily assume that the average hobbit is brown-skinned, while Harfoots are/were a darker brown. frodo is specifically described as ‘fairer than most’ (which i initially just assumed to mean that he looked good, but he’s described as having light skin at several other points, including one above), so to have that distinction, it just logically means that most hobbits have darker skin.
now if we wanted to attach real-world ethnicities at all, a good place to look to figure that out would be this post by dresdancodak, because he’s done all the research for us and describes it very well. the reason i say this would help is because, according to tolkien (well, who else), hobbits are more closely related to men than any other race, and even more closely than you would think. so it just seems like, taking all facts into account, they would be similar ethnicity-wise. one would say overall that hobbits are middle-eastern, south asian, north african - not actually, but based on the people in those areas in the same way most people would think that the characters are ‘english’.
it’s kind of the biggest, most disappointing oversight of tolkien’s writing in general that people just assume everybody is white when it is obviously not the case. if one reads lord of the rings, for instance, they will find that if a character is fair of skin, they will be described as such - and tolkien does often make the distinction between the ‘light-skinned’ fair and the ‘good-looking’ fair.
EDIT: since literary students are getting all rustled up over this, and i have learned some things over the last few days, i’m gonna go ahead and say that i didn’t mean to say that the people of the shire WEREN’T based on the rural english people, but that, if we wanted to, we could say that they were different with reasonable benefit of doubt. and my comparison between men and hobbits still stands because they are meant to be similar. some hobbits, like the stoors who lived in the vales of anduin, could be more closely related to the rohirric people, aka the anglo-saxon representation, but there’s no ignoring the origin of men in middle-earth. unless tolkien was horribly confused about atlantis.
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