A question of Hobbit and Human ages...

[Airetelluma]

To reach the age of 111 was a very rare occurrance for Hobbits, and it would be the same for us today.

Yes, true, but I could have sworn that I read somewhere (maybe in the prologue to Fellowship) that hobbits generally live to be around 100, and the human life expectancy is somewhere around 80, 85, I believe. But if you really wanted to take it a step further, I'm sure that the human life expectancy was even less in Tolkien's time.

But it seems that they assigned different ages for rites of passage than we do today.

They didn't just assign it, though. Hobbits in their tweens seemed to act like humans in our teens; it's not like they really became mature and adult-like at 18-21 and 33 is just for show. Of course, though, I'm only going by Pippin here, because he's the only hobbit that we see a lot of that's still not come of age.

If our coming of age is 18, and hobbits' is 33, then there's 15 years difference there, and there's 15-20 years difference in the regular hobbit and human life expectancies.
Anyway, to try to answer Azaelia's question, I think there's about a 15 year age difference between hobbits and humans. Example: If a human was 52, they'd be about 37 in hobbit years.

I don't know about you, but I just royally confused myself... [img]smilies/confused.gif[/img]

[ January 01, 2002: Message edited by: Airetelluma ]