YOOOO HOBBITS. FUCKING HOBBITS MAN. LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT HOBBITS.
ok, so imagine you’re kind of this angel dude. except like you’re old and you spend 100% of your time on the mortal plane. so like you’re actually a wizard.
(ok i am not saying that you gotta be old to be a wizard thingol was one of the first elves ever and he met melian and like thingol knew some fly babes being an elf surrounded by elves but melian was fucking UNREAL like they literally just sat and stared at each other for at least five million years and got all moldy and had about fifty raccoons go through their full life cycles around them before they even said “yo babe u so fine” to each other (so i gotta assume that melian was into that too) (thingol how are you such a fucking babe)
my point is that melian was a maia of the same class as gandalf and not to say that old people aren’t lookers but she must have looked bangin fine to thingol cause elves are probs the vainest out of all the races)
oh yo look at that elves stealing the narrative from the hobbits T Y P I C A L anyway
ok so imagine you’re this angel dude called olórin, but like, most dudes these days call you gandalf because human men can’t pronounce elfy things unless they’ve descended from the kings of arnost or whatever
and like yo, fuck men. you thought they’d be a step up from the elves??? cause like way back when everything didn’t exist there was this dude named Ilúvatar. and he made fuckin’ everything??? like all the current gods and stuff. and then he got all of these dudes he made to sing and they sung middle earth into existence. like wow. dang. I’LL GO INTO THE NITTY GRITTY DETAILS OF THE MIDDLE EARTH CREATION MYTH LATER but basically melkor who would become morgoth who was basically sauron’s boss started shITTING THINGS UP with his song because he wanted to make people and Ilúvatar was like. so ok with that? basically what he did was take melkor’s song and helped it turn into PEOPLE. DA RACES OF MIDDLE EARTH….. namely elves and men because elves wrote down this shit and they only cared about men and also dwarves but only because they HATED DWARVES
anyway fast forward just a little bit later when the gods who decided to go to middle earth went and started making shit this one dudegod called Aulë the smith wanted to make ppl just like melkor did but he like slaved over these little dudes ok he wanted to be pals with them and then MANWË KING OF THE EARTHLY GODS found them and was like dude what are you doing
and aulë was like OK I KNOW I DID A BAD I’LL GET RID OF THEM but the little guys he created were like oh nooooooo and manwë was like oh shit you created a sentient species how the fuck did you do that we can’t kill them now oh shit
so they kept them around
(ps: they were dwarves)
(which is why dwarves are crafty little fuckers)
THE POINT OF ALL OF THIS IS that gandalf and the other maiar knew where elves, men, and dwarves came from. you had like, weird anomalies like tom bombadil (ps: no one knows what tom bombadil’s deal is, literally no one), but other than a few stories of strange creatures and the fae these were The Established Races of Middle Earth and everyone knew that
and they were made to combat the evil that melkor had introduced but they were only mostly good at fighting each other for shiny shit (THE ENTIRE META PLOT OF THE SILMARILLION LMFAO)
so yeah gandalf must have been pretty burnt out on sentient races in general
and then these little dudes came out of nowhere to the king of men and were like HEY UH CAN WE SETTLE IN SOME REALLY CHILL LAND UP NORTHWEST OF HERE and literally everyone was like what the fuck who are you
HOBBITS. FUCKING HOBBITS. like, the men knew about them more or less (the root of the word hobbit came from the rohirric word for hole-builder, holbytlan) but according to the hobbits they just were wandering around, crossed a few mountains, then asked to settle in the shire. and then they were industrious and sturdy and courteous and really british and
gandalf was like
what the shit
i have been here since the beginning of LITERALLY EVERYTHING and i have never seen or heard of these guys before
i imagine most of his dealings with the hobbits in the beginning were kind of suspicious??? like he knew that melkor and sauron were still lurking around and they had already made orcs (fun fact: melkor and sauron can’t make living races like ilúvatar and apparently aulë can, so wheeeere did orcs come from? they tortured the living daylights out of some elves until they turned into orcs. :) happy nightmares!!) so he must have been like really sneaky like WHO ARE YOU… WHY ARE YOU HERE……. ARE YOU UNDER SOME MAD GLAMOUR, LIKE ARE YOU ACTUALLY LIKE MINI ORCS……. WHY ARE YOU PASSING ME THIS PIPE
but like after centuries of living alongside hobbits on and off he’d come to realize that hobbits were just hobbits: really decent little guys who popped out of nowhere?? like he must have consulted radagast and saruman and had really deep beardstrokey conversations with them about say did vana ever tell you about little furry footed guys she made this one time no radagast that squirrel looks terrible on you also saruman did manwë ever tell you about these really decent race of beings who like partying and drinking but also being nice and saruman probably just cringed and promised himself he’d try to find weed from another dealer
but i digress
like, this is just personal speculation, but there are a lot of hints that hobbits might have been some kind of strange sub-mish-mash of all of the elements of the other races?? there are three subraces of hobbit, and not to go too deeply into it, the subraces tended to align themselves with each of the three “good guy” races of middle earth: harfoots were similar to men, stoors were similar to dwarves, and fallohides were similar to elves. so, maybe the proper conclusion to draw here was to say that hobbits were supposed to be sort of a subrace? a helper race to the other races?
NOT SO FAST!!! if that was the case, and if none of the other gods knew where the fuck they came from, they probably would have been mentioned in the beginning song of ilúvatar. ok, maybe they were and the elves just didn’t mention them because elves are REALLY FUCKING VAIN. again NOT SO FAST!!!! if the hobbits were made as a subrace to all of the other races, that would mean that someone would have had to have seen the dwarves coming, since the stoors are so similar to them. BUT NO ONE SAW THE DWARVES COMING. SO NO ONE COULD HAVE SEEN THE STOORS COMING. SO NO ONE COULD HAVE SEEN THE HOBBITS COMING. PERIOD.
sooooooooooooo the next mystery that gandalf probably ruminated about for the next six squillion years was WHERE DID HOBBITS COME FROM. WHAT THE FUCK IS THEIR DEAL. he probably asked tom bombadil those exact questions, to which tom answered, CHILL THE FUCK OUT HOW THE HELL SHOULD ANYONE KNOW I NEED TO GET BACK TO MY BALLIN LADY GOLDBERRY DEUCES BROTHER IMMA BOUNCE (someday someone’s going to ask ilúvatar about this. and he will probably just giggle to himself. inscrutable nutlord.)
that’s the thing about the hobbits??? no one knows where they came from, what their deal is, or how they ended up being so placid and nice, but really really tough when they need to be!!! so when things started really shaking up in middle earth and gandalf was like shit son, all of you big races gonna fuck ur own shit up again
he thought about the hobbits
hobbits aren’t like the big races in one huge way: they don’t really want power? i mean you have nasty hobbits and whatnot, but mostly they lead very quiet lives in a nice place where peace is common. they have everything they want???
and then gandalf was like
perfect
these are the perfect adventurers
because hobbits don’t really want the stress of being in battle, they just want to get back to their hobbit holes and read about things they understand so even if they’re thrown in a huge ruckus and all of the responsibility is put on them, even if it takes a huge amount of effort to get back to the quo they love, they’ll do it because they don’t?? want the glory??? or power or anything??? they don’t want anything from the other races. they don’t want sparklies. they don’t want rings. they just wanna go home. they just want to party and eat.
and gandalf (and i) clapped his hands over his face and sobbed i have found theperfect warrior race
like of course it took some convincing because getting a hobbit out of their hole is like poking your hand directly into hot coals (seriously, there was this one time when wolves invaded the entire shire and this guy who was, i shit you not, pippin took’s direct ancestor, was like, hang on dudes we got this, and like nine million hobbits came from fucking nowhere and the wolves were just fucking gone)
but like, that’s a part of the point
fortunately the fallohides were way more inquisitive than the other hobbit races and you could literally calculate a hobbit’s normal to crazy ratio by how many fallohide ancestors they had
(btw: tooks and brandybucks have the strongest ancestral ties back to the fallohides, and frodo baggins was a brandybuck by way of his mom, and im like three hundred percent sure that bilbo has a brandybuck mom too. the bagginses were weirdly adventurous man. samwise gamgee most likely had zero family ties to the fallohides meaning that all of his batshit insane heroics were all gamgee pride. dont u even fuck with a gamgee)
(EDIT: thanks 2 tumblr user domesticlifeofghosts we now know that bilbo’s mom was a took. flaunt ur new knowledge, ladies and gentlemen)
so gandalf hired bilbo to go on an adventure and the rest is pretty much history
the neat thing about hobbits though is that they are literally like…. like, ok, say you are playing a normal d&d style rpg. you have your hero, like a warrior or something, a wizard, a ranger, etc. and like. you have the little halfling thief who doesn’t get up to much but steal shit and make everyone cry over their piddly str stat
and suddenly at the end of the game, after the warrior and wizard and ranger squabble over directions and loot and heavy moral decisions, at the very last boss and everyone’s just like OH SHIT OH SHIT I’M OUT OF MANA AND THAT SHITTER JUST BROKE MY SWORD etc, the little halfling thief walks over, pokes the bad guy in between the eyes, and it shrieks and shrivels and fucking dies in this cataclysmic explosion
and while the other three are like open mouthed flabbergasted the thief shrugs and is like, “what? you guys have been literally arguing over this for like eight hours and there is no more pizza im outties”
and they just do a backflip and moonwalk out
ok that is the relationship of the hobbits to the rest of the sentient races of middle earth. who the fuck? how the fuck? why? they eat too much and are too happy and well-adjusted to be good warriors
unbeknownst to them that’s what makes them highly functional heroes says gandalf, with one last beardly wink to the audience
fucking hobbits, man
fucking hobbits
