[Child of the 7th Age]

Good question, Littlemanpoet! You've got me thinking again when I should be doing household chores.....

My own feeling is that this is a purposeful omission. As Kuruharan and Gurthang say, it's not so much a matter of being "scary" as that a cemetary just desn't fit into the overall depiction or tone that Tolkien gave us of the Shire.

In addition to the memorial that's already been mentioned, there actually was one brief reference to the internment of the 70 ruffians and 19 hobbits killed in the Battle of Bywater. This seems to imply that burial was the general rule for Hobbits, since it's mentioned so matter-of-factly:

The dead ruffians were laden on waggons and hauled off to an old sand-pit nearby and there buried: in the Battle Pit as it was afterwards called. The fallen hobbits were laid together in a grave on the hillside, where later a great stone was set up with a garden about it.

I am trying to remember if there are any mention of Hobbit burial customs or tombs in the books outside Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit--specifically Unfinished Tales, the Peoples of Middle-earth, and the four volumes of HoMe that cover the War of the Ring. I could be wrong, but I don't believe so.

I think there are reasons for this. First, the Shire and the Hobbits originated in the children's book The Hobbit . Tolkien added to this tapestry in the beginning chapters of the Lord of the Rings but he essentially did not change the tone of things he had established earlier. Cemetaries or burial customs certainly wouldn't have fit well in a children's book, and Tolkien does not change this pattern at the start of LotR. I am reminded of Tolkien's own short description of the Shire:

...an ordered district of government and business, the business of growing food and eating it and living in comparative peace and content.

The emphasis here is heavy on "living" in the sense of day to day activities, rather than anything larger. Indeed, the Hobbits are the one folk in the book who best exemplify the simple joys of everyday life.

Other people have commented that the Shire in the early chapters of the Lord of the Rings has a different "feel" about it than other places described later on in Middle-earth. (There is a thread about this that Littlemanpoet started.) Certainly, the Shire was more fanciful, a less somber and dangerous place than others in Middle-earth. There were no Orcs, no battles or hardships in recent memory, and even the weather had taken a milder turn. The reader knows the real reason for the Shire's "protection": its relative distance from the problems further east and, even more importantly, the guardianship of the Rangers. But the Hobbits themselves did not.

There is one other point that bears mentioning. I have always seen a very sharp contrast between the realm of Numenor and that of the Shire. Tolkien may not have done this intentionally, but it certainly comes over in the reading. The people of Numenor were preoccupied with death, those of the Shire preoccupied with living. Numenor built great tombs above the ground and had elaborate burial rituals, which were similar to those in Egypt according to the Letters. The Hobbits were exactly the opposite. They had no elaborate death rituals and the holes they built in the ground were for living and not for death. Hence, there are no cemetaries in the Shire. Interesting thought indeed, when one considers that JRRT's personal experience with a "hole in the ground" was that of the trenches of World War I, places of terrible evil, death, and destruction. Perhaps, in the years after the war, some part of his mind transformed these places of death into the Hobbit holes, which were essentially symbols of life, that we all know and love.

(Interestingly, you can make a similar comparison between Hobbit "living" versus Elvish "decay"and "embalming"....)

And I can think of one other thing that is missing from the Shire, which I believe was left out very intentionally by the author. The Hobbits have no long range memory. They are a people who have forgotten where they come from. Every people that I know preserves some kind of tale that describes their origin, either in the form of history or myth, but the Hobbits simply do not remember and do not seem to be curious to know. The reader is told that they originated about 1050 in the area of the Anduin, although the Hobbits themselves preserve only tiny hints of this distant past. Nothing is known before this date, either by the Hobbits or the reader.

Obviously, like other peoples of Middle-earth, the Hobbits must have been somewhere before 1050. So why doesn't Tolkien go into this when he carefully delineates the line of migration for all three Hobbit branches starting at the Anduin? I don't think it's just negligence. And I refuse to believe that Hobbits simply sprang from the ground in the year 1050. I can think of two possible reasons for their earlier absence. Hobbits aren't part of the Silm so it's easier to say their early history is forgotten. that way there is no need to rewrite the earlier Legendarium, which Tolkien was frequently trying to do. Yet, in actuality, Tolkien really wouldn't have had to rewrite Silm since he covers himself by saying that the Elvish sources simply weren't concerned about Hobbits.

Perhaps it is more than that, and Hobbit history had to be forgotten. If Sauron had been aware of hobbits from his sojourn in Numenor or snooping about in Beleriand or in some other context, he would have been more cognizant of where they lived. He would have realized from the outset that they were a small people and easy to enslave, and would have been able to get to the Shire more easily and capture the elusive "Baggins". So perhaps Hobbit amnesia was a protective device, shielding them from prying eyes and making it possible for Gandalf to choose someone to carry the Ring whom Sauron would be less likely to suspect.