[Child of the 7th Age]

Son of Numenor -

I don't understand why everyone is talking about hobbits being liars. Can anyone find an example (besides Bilbo's lie about Gollum giving him the Ring as a present, which was mostly because of the nature of the Ring) of a hobbit telling a lie?

I agree. That Hobbits exaggerate or stories get reshaped in the telling I do not doubt. But that is a long way from what I would term a real "lie" -- the conscious fashioning of an untrue story to achieve a particular end, usually for individual or group self promotion.

There are several points in Tolkien's writings that suggest conscious lies were far from the norm. Why would Tolkien make such a "big deal" about Bilbo's alteration of his story on how he got the Ring if telling lies was a normal feature of Hobbit life? The very fact that this was chosen as an example of the power of the Ring, that a Hobbit would lie and alter a story under the influence of a powerful talisman of evil, suggests the opposite to be true: such behavior, that of conscious lying, was not regarded as normal.

Secondly, if we accept Tolkien at face value, then Bilbo was the author of the early part of the Red Book including the reference to Hobbit Bowmen. The prologue does give the impression of being Tolkien's personal introduction to the Red Book. But, even so, Tolkien would have had to get the data from Bilbo, since he does not claim to have other sources. Given this context, it is quite extraordinary that Bilbo would have included a detail that the presence of the Hobbit archers was not corroborated by any of the Big Folk. If anything, it would seem to indicate that Bilbo was being scrupulously honest as an author by telling his readers that, although he has heard this tale, it can not be verified in any other way.

Thirdly, just look at the tale of the Scouring of the Shire. What was the chief "sin" of Ferny and his men? One could well argue that their most blatant shortcoming was that they were bald faced "liars". Whatever words the outsiders used, they twisted the meaning of these in clever ways. Thus, they came up with a long list of "Rules" supposedly for the Hobbits' benefit, when their real intention was to haul off all the goodies. Why portray the "bad guys" as lying if this same behavior is part of the normal culture of the Shire? It doesn't make sense.

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In regard to Hobbit "poverty"..... There is no doubt that the Shire was a stratified society, just as was true of rural Edwardian and Victorian England. Wealth was presumably based on land, which some folk had and others didn't.

Yet, the writings give no hint of anything equivalent to Dickens: terrible abuses, children going hungry, and people turning to criminal behavior because they had no option. The only indication of this type of discord is in the period prior to the Scouring when Saruman and Ferny and their types took things over and hauled off the harvest so the hobbits were left with very little. The only other examples of such hardship that I can think of were the Long Winter and, by implication, the Fell Winter when the harvests totally failed.

What we do have is several indications that the Hobbits as a whole were fairly generous. Bilbo's treatment of Samwise has already been cited. There is also a telling statement by Gandalf in regard to the Shire that occurs in UT, which indicates Hobbits had a gift for sharing things with each other:

And then there was the Shire-folk. I began to have a warm place in my heart for them in the Long Winter, which none of you can remember. They were very hard put to it then: one of the worst pinches they have been in, dying of cold and cold, and starving in the dreadful dearth that followed. But that was the time to see their courage, and their pity, one for another. It was by their pity as much as by their tough uncomplaining courage that they survived.

If Hobbits were this generous at a time they were starving, they would surely have attempted to make sure everyone had at least the minimum to get by in better times.

Is such an idealized picture of a rural society 'realistic'? To be truthful, no, at least in terms of the world that I live in. As a historian, I can cite examples of real hardship resulting from the inequitable distribution of wealth in the very period which Tolkien loosely uses as his model for the Shire. And I have played in a few Middle-earth RPGs where questions of poverty and injustice are investigated even in the so-called 'good' Shire.

But, if I confine myself to Tolkien's writings alone -- not "real life" or my own fanciful flights of imagination -- then I have to admit that, while I see differences in social classes, possessions, and amount of land held, I have no hint of real hardship except in those rare instances of famine caused by natural disaster.

~Child, "Defender of the Hobbits"