The downfall of the hobbit-folk

[Farael]

First of all I would like to start with the customary apology for being unable to use the Search function of this site properly, but I THINK there are no other threads on this topic. Now, I must say that while I think I came up with this idea, it is mostly inspired by something Lalwendë said in Here

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

…though they [the hobbits] may have appeared small and insignificant, they were not delicate, but incredibly hardy beings. And powerful too, if they so chose to be. In this way Hobbits survived where many Men, Orcs and even Elves did not.

But while Tolkien did not kill off his Hobbits, he did inflict terrible injuries on The Shire. He could easily have had Sam restore it fully (i.e. right back to the original state, with all trees restored, and with the Elven 'soil'. But he did leave the hint that the recovery was not complete, and that this was a very different Shire than the one the four Hobbits first left behind. For me, it seems Tolkien treated his landscapes with as much (and at times more) affection as he treated his characters, so to have The Shire marred in this way very much mirrors what happens to Frodo. Survival, but not a full recovery?

My bolding, of course

Now, this brings up an interesting point… The Professor says that the hobbits dwindled and diminished as the fourth age came along and men took over Middle Earth. Yet why would a people so hardy when pressed, so entrenched with all the forces of life become a shadow of their former self and finally disappear for all intents and purposes?

It might have been Tolkien trying to reconciliate the fact that he presented Lord Of The Rings as an alternate history of mankind and as we all know there are no hobbits to be found nowadays. Even if some people has us wondering if… maybe… perhaps… but I digress.

Yet it might have been something else. Perhaps, as I thought after reading Lalwendë’s post, the marring of the Shire (in spite of Sam’s best efforts) started the beginning of the end for the Hobbit folk. Perhaps The Shire (which as far as I know was the main hobbit-only settlement of Middle Earth) was never exactly the same and maybe this caused a change in the people that lived there. Maybe Mormegil is right when he says that the destruction caused by Saruman may have taken away the innocence from the Hobbits in general, something that neither Sam’s nor Pippin’s nor Merry’s best efforts could ever heal. Possibly because they had also lost their innocence somewhere along their adventure.

I must say that up until now I thought that my first argument was the most likely one. There are no hobbits nowadays so the Professor had to find something to explain why the hobbits had disappeared. Even if he says that there may still be some hobbits around yet they are so skilful in avoiding us that we would never know it, for all intents and purposes he is telling us that hobbits are nowhere to be found, as far as we are concerned. Yet the more I think about it, the more I see that the very same thing that made The Shire unlike any other place, even Bree (that had a high hobbit population) was their innocence. They were completely and blissfully unaware of the world outside their little parcels of land and that ignorance was what permitted their society to work as well as it did. Yet whether they liked it or not, they had had a first-hand experience of the “real” world with Saruman and his ruffians and that was something that could probably not have been forgotten so easily.

I am not as versed in Tolkienism (or should it be Tolkienity? ) as some of my fellow posters here, but as far as I know we have no information on what happened on The Shire after Sam’s lifetime. Isn’t it possible that their society collapsed, their innocence taken away by the spite of Saruman? Wouldn’t that plausibly explain what happened with the hobbits much better than a simple notion that “They don’t really liked the big noisy men so they retreated into the forest, slowly loosing all knowledge of the arts that they once had. Nowadays, should any hobbits be found, they would probably be concerned only with their most primal needs, which one of them happens to be avoiding us humans” (Which is, very very paraphrased, what I understand Tolkien is telling us)