Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What is the racial composition of a hobbit?

What colour are hobbits, do you suppose?

What colour are hobbits, do you suppose? When I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, as a child, I gathered that they were very short, hirsute, quite swarthy and fairly stupid — so probably Portuguese, or at a pinch Galician. They didn’t seem to be, from the descriptions of their behaviour and living arrangements, quite — you know — white. Nearly white, maybe, but not quite. Proper white people, I thought, are taller than hobbits, less hysterical and tend not to live underground. But this was back in the days before I had heard of John Bercow. Also, proper white people had electricity, cars and supermarkets. One’s views change markedly over the years. Back then, I assumed that hobbits were Latins, or perhaps even Romanian, a Slavic-Latin mélange. There is something grim and Slavic about a hobbit, in my opinion, and it is easy to imagine Middle Earth as being a bit like Moldova.

This is an important issue because a British woman of Pakistani descent, one Naz Humphreys, was recently turned down for the role of a hobbit in Peter Jackson’s new film of the book, which is being shot in New Zealand right now. Naz — a ‘social researcher’, wouldn’t you guess — apparently queued for three hours for the chance to play a supporting hobbit, an also-ran hobbit, but was told to clear off because she was a darkie. Apparently the casting man said: ‘We’re looking for light-skinned people. I’m not trying to be, whatever. It’s just the brief. You’ve got to look like a hobbit.’

Ah, but whose version, whose conception, of a hobbit? They are, after all, fictional creatures. So far as I remember, J.R.R. Tolkien never suggested they should all look like members of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement. Maybe he just assumed that everyone would assume that’s how they’d look, like smaller, hairier, versions of Eugene Terreblanche.

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