Why Genealogies?

[Legolas]

Living in a very small town with a lot of farmers and at best, a slow trickle of new faces, I can tell you that many of the people here of my grandparents' and to a somewhat lesser degree, my parents' generation aren't too different. It looks as though it'll be lost a bit with my generation with more of us getting jobs elsewhere, completing college, etc.

Just a part of small town life?

Perhaps part of it is because many of us live on the same family land, passed down and divided among the generations, so we have benefited quite tangibly from some of their toils.

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Legolas

Living in a very small town with a lot of farmers and at best, a slow trickle of new faces, I can tell you that many of the people here of my grandparents' and to a somewhat lesser degree, my parents' generation aren't too different. It looks as though it'll be lost a bit with my generation with more of us getting jobs elsewhere, completing college, etc.

Just a part of small town life?

Perhaps part of it is because many of us live on the same family land, passed down and divided among the generations, so we have benefited quite tangibly from some of their toils.

I've been reading about how there were so many families with the same surname concentrated in the area where I grew up that some of them took on nicknames, so that one family could be distinguished from each other. For example, you might be a 'Yen Caunce', 'Moss Caunce', or you might be a 'Danny Leatherbarrow'. No doubt it was further complicated by parents using the traditional naming patterns for first names - e.g. first son named after his paternal grandfather, first daughter after her maternal grandmother etc.

I note that with Hobbits, they sometimes were identified not just by surname but by their location too. Though they seemed to have more variety of first names.

I just wish the Noldorian Elves had been more considerate, given how awkward it can be to discriminate between all the names beginning with F.

[blantyr]

As my father approached retirement age, he started getting into genealogy. After his death, as my sister and I approached retirement age, we took it up as well. I fulfilled my father's quest to trace back to the Mayflower, and confirmed a family rumor that we're distantly related to Abe Lincoln.

Maybe the hobbits need roots. Can't say why Tolkien thought hobbits would be into genealogy, but while the humans had great cities, the dwarves great halls, the elves a deep history not so many generations back, what did the hobbits have? Sure, they had an idealized rural pre-industrial culture, not as such cultures were, but perhaps as they ought to have been. But what did the hobbits have personally?

Anyway, that's a bit of why I got into it. I'm not going to leave a lot for history to find me, but it's nice to know you're part of it?

[Formendacil]

As threads go, this isn't such an old one to be relifting... but I do not recall reading it before and it turns out I have something to add.

Regarding the Hobbits and genealogy, my own experience leads me to make a connection to their large families. On my mother's side, she was one of nine children, her mother was one of fifteen and her father (my grandfather, who was also my grandmother's second cousin--they shared great-grandparents) was one of eight, and these numbers were not at all unusual in the area they grew up: a farming area in western Saskatchewan settled by interrelated families of the same ethnic background (in this case, Catholic Germans who'd been farming in Russia from the time of Catherine the Great until the Russian Revolution). So... not an un-Hobbitlike community.

And although far better records exist on the other side of the family for research, I have always associated genealogical interest with my maternal side, because that was something that was always a topic for conversation when visiting--and in true Hobbit fashion (think: mushrooms), it was something that we never seemed to tire of: who was who's kid and how were they related. I have second- and third-cousins (once or twice removed) and great-aunts who have taken the trouble to record a lot of this information, but it was rarely written down in my memories: Grandpa just knew that so-and-so was his cousin on his father's side and that this cousin was married to the Thems-its, and we had a connection to that family on through the OtherOnes (connections of both him and my grandmother).

In other words, this genealogical interest was necessary for keeping track of your relatives in a community full of large familes--and large families grow at an exponential rate. At only 38 grand-children on that side of my family, I can keep track of them all (my younger siblings can't). My mom could keep track of all 80 or so of hers, but it took dialogue with my grandparents to keep track of anyone more distantly related. I imagine, especially given the stability of Hobbit communities, which were not spread across four provinces as mine came to be (four farthings, maybe) would have found such information relevant on a far more regular basis. After all, Hobbits are a bit gossipy, and gossip, like soap operas, make so much more engaged entertainment if you know the backstory--in other words, the family history.

[shadowfax]

Just my own irrelevant observations here.

In contrast to the Elves of Dwarves, the Hobbits didn't have much of a heroic mythology they could refer to or justify their nationhood with. They didn't like or seek out adventures and things stayed more or less the same for generations.

Now mythologies are important things for nation building. Americans have a fascination for the Founding Fathers, the Civil War, the Civil Rights era etc and especially the individual leaders who moved and changed things during those crucial periods. The Germans do similarly with Charlemaigne, their great philopshers, heroes of the anti-Nazi resistance etc. The French have Joan of Arc, the philosophers and heroes of the Revolution, Chales de Gaulle etc. In any town you can find streets, schools and monuments named after these figures. Quoting their words is almost akin to quoting from the Bible. I'm intentionally leaving out England here as I think England doen't really have a culture of worshipping heroes. Smaller nations who have had a less warlike history need to look to less mythological figures to define their nationhood. Quite often this means people behind smaller invetions and people who achieved smaller things.

So not having mythology, the next best thing is to study the smaller deeds of your great-grand uncles. Cue Merry's ability to entertain Theoden with the back-history of the Hornblower leaf.

[Tar-Jêx]

Originally Posted by shadowfax

Just my own irrelevant observations here.

In contrast to the Elves of Dwarves, the Hobbits didn't have much of a heroic mythology they could refer to or justify their nationhood with. They didn't like or seek out adventures and things stayed more or less the same for generations.

Now mythologies are important things for nation building. Americans have a fascination for the Founding Fathers, the Civil War, the Civil Rights era etc and especially the individual leaders who moved and changed things during those crucial periods. The Germans do similarly with Charlemaigne, their great philopshers, heroes of the anti-Nazi resistance etc. The French have Joan of Arc, the philosophers and heroes of the Revolution, Chales de Gaulle etc. In any town you can find streets, schools and monuments named after these figures. Quoting their words is almost akin to quoting from the Bible. I'm intentionally leaving out England here as I think England doen't really have a culture of worshipping heroes. Smaller nations who have had a less warlike history need to look to less mythological figures to define their nationhood. Quite often this means people behind smaller invetions and people who achieved smaller things.

So not having mythology, the next best thing is to study the smaller deeds of your great-grand uncles. Cue Merry's ability to entertain Theoden with the back-history of the Hornblower leaf.

The Hobbits have tales of Bullroarer Took and the war with the wargs and goblins in the Battle of Greenfields, but that's about it. I suppose Gerontius Took was a well known figure, too.

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by shadowfax

In contrast to the Elves of Dwarves, the Hobbits didn't have much of a heroic mythology they could refer to or justify their nationhood with. They didn't like or seek out adventures and things stayed more or less the same for generations.

Did Hobbits have a very strong concept of "nationhood"? The structure of their society seems in some ways to have circumvented the concept of the State (a concept of which Professor Tolkien appears to have disapproved - see Letter 52) particularly in its lack of formal government.

The interest in genealogies evokes to me the notion presented in the Prologue that Hobbits "liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions." It seems to me to be associated with that not-entirely-involuntary myopia which seems to have been a characteristic of Hobbit society's psychological survival in a dangerous world: establishing what they did know, and convincing themselves that that was all there was to know, or all that anyone would ever need to know.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

The interest in genealogies evokes to me the notion presented in the Prologue that Hobbits "liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions." It seems to me to be associated with that not-entirely-involuntary myopia which seems to have been a characteristic of Hobbit society's psychological survival in a dangerous world: establishing what they did know, and convincing themselves that that was all there was to know, or all that anyone would ever need to know.

Yes, indeed. I think the Hobbits had become so comfortable and contented with their state in the world that their insularity was a foregone conclusion.
Other races, such as the Dwarves and exiled Númenóreans set a lot of store by ancestry, but that seems to have been mainly confined to establishing links to royalty and "noble" blood.
Hobbits were, of course, only afforded the luxury of being able to focus on mundane matters through the efforts of Gandalf and the Rangers. I know of no other group in Middle-earth that could allow themselves to focus so inwardly for so long.