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Originally Posted by Inziladun
Maybe it's just a matter of Tolkien thinking he didn't want to be too detailed about the Shire goings-on during the great events of the War.
After all, he was concerned during initial drafts of the first chapters of what would become LOTR that the tale had "too many hobbits". It seems the reader is told just enough to know Lotho was a bad apple as far as hobbits went.
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I always thought it was a literary device used by Tolkien to remind us the reader just how parochial the hobbits were. Having moved into and out of a lot of smallish towns in my life, it is a common practice for people in such environs to start referencing people and events with no explanation because "everybody around here knows about them and here is all there is."
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Originally Posted by Rune Son of Bjarne
On a different note, it also wondered why the returning Hobbits did not go and consult Farmer Maggot when they discovered that mischief was afoot... How lucky they found a somewhat similar character in Farmer Cotton.
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Similar right down to having the same number of letters in the name and a double letter in the middle...
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...finding a path that cannot be found, walking a road that cannot be seen, climbing a ladder that was never placed, or reading a paragraph that has no...
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