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Riding in Carts With Hobbits - Page 3

© Michael Martinez

Those Indo-European peoples who moved into Europe settled among the farmers in the heavily forested lands and adopted some of their lifestyle. One of these customs was the traditional slash-your-way-out-of-farmland. According to Tacitus, who wrote about them in the 1st century CE, the Germans, a northern group of Indo-Europeans, adopted the custom of requiring families to leave their farms every year. Tacitus had the impression that German tribes sort of swarmed about the countryside, burning their homes and rebuilding them each year. Such measures may have been extraordinary, and they may have had political motives behind them. Archaeology shows us there were fortified towns in northern Europe, connected by roads and seaborne traderoutes, as long ago as 1400 BCE. The western Germans, from whom came the Saxons, Franks, and Burgundians of early medieval history, were arguably the most primitive tribes in the north. But they nonetheless had their own large towns and could muster respectable armies capable of destroying seasoned Roman legions, including Quinctilius Varus' three ill-fated legions in the early 1st century CE. All these wandering barbarian farmers most likely provided Tolkien with a blueprint for his Hobbit migrations. The Hobbits were not warlike. They did not conquer empires. Instead, they found comfortable homelands and settled down for as long as the local politics permitted them to do so. Much like the Celts and Germans, who diverged from the same ancestral Indo-European sub-cultures sometime in the late 3rd or early 2nd millennium BCE, the Hobbits became divided into two populations after they entered Eriador. Now, many people will be quick to point out that there were three Hobbit groups: Fallohides, Stoors, and Harfoots. Yes, that is so. But the Fallohides and Harfoots stayed in the north. They crossed the Misty Mountains via the High Pass (above Rivendell -- the same pass where Thorin and Company were captured by Goblins in The Hobbit) and settled in Rhudaur, probably between the Mitheithel and the Weather Hills. The Stoors crossed the Misty Mountains via the Redhorn pass, and they split into two groups. Some of the Stoors wandered north to the Angle and settled in Cardolan. The rest of the Stoors settled in Dunland, south of the Cardolan border. It is probably not a coincidence that Hobbit families descended from the Stoors of Dunland have "Celtic" names, whereas Hobbit families descended from the northern groups have "Germanic" names. Many readers have observed through the years how the Dunlendings seem to be a bit "Celtic".

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