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I have to say that I’m a little skeptical of these “adjustment” arguments. I’m not convinced we moderns have significantly higher life expectancies than our forebears. Socrates was 70 and still going strong when he was compelled to drink hemlock. Plato lived to the ripe old age of 80. Sure, we have fancy new medicine and technology – but we also have pollution to poison our air, a depleted ozone layer, dangerous chemicals in our food and drinking water, heart disease from fast-food diets, sedentary lifestyles, etc. – all health challenges with which the ancients did not have to contend. My understanding is that life expectancy figures have skewed upwards since the 1930’s in significant part because of lowered infant mortality rates.
Rather than adjusting the mean Hobbit life expectancy upward as Theron has suggested, I wonder if it shouldn’t rather be adjusted downward. Any Hobbit mentioned in the genealogies is bound to be a more high-born, well-to-do Hobbit, with greater access to good food and whatever sort of healthcare that was available. They’d naturally have better shelter and a lifestyle less afflicted by hardship. Your average working Hobbit, bending his back on a farm, say, and living in a drafty house instead of a cozy Hobbit-hole, would probably have a slightly lower life expectancy.
Even if you take these values on their face, 92 years for the average Hobbit, 75 as a nice round number for real-world folks, the math works out so that 50 Hobbit years equals 40.8 human years – definitely standing at the gate of middle age.
In The Hobbit, Bilbo is clearly intended as a rather ridiculous fellow. Who’s more comical and absurd, the youthful hero heading out for a grand adventure, or a short, paunchy, middle-aged fellow who never leaves the house without a pocket-handkerchief in his waistcoat and second breakfast in his belly? The latter, of course.
It’s also significant that Frodo is older than his friends. Only Pippin is not yet out of his tweens – and acts like it. Tolkien could just as easily have made Frodo a contemporary of his younger companions, but he didn’t. Why? I don’t know if the question can be answered definitively, since even in very early conceptions of the story, well before the journey Frodo would take was imagined, “Bingo” was older than his traveling companions and still middle-aged for a Hobbit. Perhaps it’s simply that making Frodo younger changes the focus of the story to a coming-of-age motif – and Tolkien wasn’t setting out to tell a coming-of-age tale.
Interesting side note: while checking out a little HoME for this post, I noticed that ‘Orlando’ and ‘Vigo’ [sic] were both considered as names for Hobbits in early versions of LotR. Hum The Twilight Zone theme with me...
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