Possible Drabblespam, and a Hobbit Demographic Question

[browngirl]

I've been sick, so it feels like I spend my life at work or asleep. At work I can write, but only drabbles; I get interrupted too much for anything else. Hopefully I can write several drabbles today amidst the work I'm doing.

First of all, though: How many hobbits, do you think, live in:

1) Buckland?
2) Bucklebury?
3) a "small" hobbit village?
4) a hobbit town like Hobbiton or Bywater?
5) A place like Great Smials or Brandy Hall?
6) The Shire as a whole (including Buckland)?

I've been trying to work these ideas out, and I thought I'd ask for others' perspectives as well.

Comments

[maripo5a.livejournal.com]

Oh god, I read a whole PAPER on this topic once, I found it while googling around... it was very good, scholarly, well-thought-out, etc... and of course I have no idea where I found it.

That said, I believe Tolkien said several hundred hobbits lived at Brandy Hall and the Great Smials, which is at least a starting point...

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

It helps. :)

[baranduin.livejournal.com]

Crud. I read something about that fairly recently. Thought it might be one of the resource papers at Henneth Annun, but I've checked there and can't find it.

I'll let you know if I run across it. Will keep thinking on where I might have seen it.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

I've been thinking about how *wide* the Brandywine is, too. Do you think it's as big as the Charles? Or maybe the Mystic?

[danachan.livejournal.com]

I know I've read something on this. I'll go looking for it.

And hundreds live at Brandy Hall, yeah?

Anyway: there was this Mr. Frodo left an orphan and stranded, as you might say, among those queer Bucklanders, being brought up anyhow in Brandy Hall. A regular warren, by all accounts. Old Master Gorbadoc never had fewer than a couple of hundred relations in the place.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

I figure Brandy Hall and Great Smials for about 300 hobbits each (200 residents and 100 staff). What do you think the non-servants do with themselves? (What do you think Merry does all day besides shtup Pippin) I've been thinking a lot about practical hobbit life recently.

[danachan.livejournal.com]

That sounds about right. Or just go love on strangerian's brain some more, for it is brilliant and wonderful. And squishy, but that's a brain for you, eh? *grin*

Practical hobbit life is a good thing to think about, y'know.

[strangerian.livejournal.com]

Well, I once figured that the Shire was, approximately, 40 miles square, counting a league as three miles, or something like that. Note that this is *not* 40 square miles, but 1600 -- minus marshes, mountains, unpopulated forests, lakes, and other uninhabited areas -- square miles available for use.

I'd guess a square mile of land would support a large family of hobbits, in the more or less one-family sense -- not all the Tooks in Great Smials or anything. That might be 8 or 10 hobbits. By the way, I don't know anything about this; I'm just making it up. That's an average, so that in practice you'd have 50 hobbits living in a village or 500 in a town, while fewer than 10 hobbits/mile actually lived on farms. It also includes some land that supports cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, and other sources of meat, cheese, milk and eggs as part of the Shire diet.

For the sake of the argument, say that half the land in the Shire is farmed and inhabited in this way, what with the forests, lakes, and odd corners where my measurements are off. At 10 hobbits/square mile, that gives you 8000 hobbits populating the Shire.

For what it's worth, there's an estimate. I may be wildly off in how much land it takes to support a hobbit. It *is* clear that most if not all food is raised right in the Shire, with only specialty luxuries imported from outside. Maybe fish and some game could be counted as from outside, even if caught within the Shire. It still seems to me that at least 95% of the Shire diet has to be produced locally.

In the book, nothing suggests that the population is pushing at its limits, not when large tracts of forest still exist in the Shire.

Um, does any of this help?

Didactically yours

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

This is PERFECT!

And now I'm going to take your numbers and run with them a little. I don't think hobbits actually eat *quite* as much as their equivalent humans, perhaps 4/5. (Much hay is made of Pippin being hungry in Minas Tirith, but Pip is the equivalent of those eighteen-year-old boys who eat endlessly, I think), and they were quite happy to spread out to the Westmarch and stuff, right?

So I'd say closer to 9000 hobbits, with maybe 1000 of them in Buckland.

Thank you for giving me a starting point for this! (And so much else, with your wonderful take on the Shire!)

[strangerian.livejournal.com]

It's possible that more than 10-odd hobbits would be fed from a square mile of land (and I agree that even stout-eating hobbits wouldn't consume as much as today's humans). A homestead in the 19th-century U.S. was a *quarter* of a square mile, presumably able to support a family when farmed, so my figures might be low, especially for hobbits.

Another variable is the kind of farming being done. Crop rotation and other refinements could make a huge difference in how productive a given area might be over the long term.

Theory aside, the book also makes it clear that pipeweed leaf was grown commercially in some areas, rather than food, so again the picture of the Shire in LotR is of an area prosperous enough not to need all of its arable land just to feed the inhabitants. The Shire population is evidently a comfortable margin below what the land *can* support.

One friend of mine has asked, fairly I think, why hobbits *aren't* bursting the boundaries of the Shire, if they've been living there for, um, 1400 years (Shire Reckoning) and have such expansive lifespans and families, with no mention of disease. I can only suggest that the average family is closer to 2-3 children than 10 -- even the Took and Brandybuck family trees have plenty of apparently childless members, to balance the occasional broods of 10 or more.

I've probably read one of the essays mentioned above, though I'm just as hopeless at finding it again. The gist, however, was a theory that a century or so before the events of LotR was a poor time for hobbits: possibly bad-weather famine, hypothetical disease, something like that. It suggested that the SR 1300s families of 5, 6, or 10 children were higher-than-usual levels of population replacement, rather than typical for the whole Shire history.

Best wishes for your writing, which I enjoy often!