<font face="Verdana"><table><TR><TD><FONT SIZE="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">The Unquiet Dead
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<img src="http://www.barrowdowns.com/images/posticons/onering.jpg" align=absmiddle> Re: origin of hobbits
I don't believe that I would make as much of the long lives of hobbits as you do. Based on some calculations I just did from the appendices, the average King of Rohan, a lesser man without Numenorean blood, lived 81.3 years if you don't average in those who met (usually violent) premature deaths. And the fact that these guys died violent deaths in their sixties and seventies speaks to their hale, hearty mettle at those ages.
A sampling of hobbit genealogies shows that Bagginses lived to an average age of 94.1 years (based on the first 15 sampled). Brandybucks averaged 94.3 years. A sample of Tooks (excluding Gerontius) avaeraged 103 years. (Even with the Old Took added, the average was still only 104.6 years.) Gamgees left inadequate data.
Using 97 years as an average hobbit age of death, possibly inflated due to noted Took longevity, This leaves only 15.7 years difference between the available samples of lesser men and those of hobbits. Granted the much greater diffrence between the average age of death of lesser men and those of Numenoreans or Dwarves -- both groups who might reasonably expect to live a couple of centuries, or more, without violent death -- hobbits don't strike me as terribly long-lived. Factor in their comparatively very healthy lifestyles and the discrepancy need not be understood as something innate to hobbits at all. All of Tolkien's peoples, members of a heroic past, were undertsood to be longer-lived then historical men.
I would argue that hobbits' life-expectancy argues much more nearly in favor of their kinship with lesser men than it does against it.
</p>Edited by <A HREF=http://www.barrowdowns.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_profile&u=00000201>galpsi</A> at: 9/8/00 3:55:20 am
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