The hobbits invent a fun game called âhow close can we get to our friends before they notice usâ
easy mode: Gimli (makes a lot of noise himself, very easy to sneak up on)
medium mode: Boromir (challenging enough to be great fun)
hard more: Aragorn (VERY attentive to his surroundings)
expert mode: Legolas
it takes them a LONG time to get Legolas but Frodo eventually manages it and itâs magnificent
Legolas: *sitting around minding his own business*
Frodo: *two inches from his ear* hi Legolas whatâs up
Legolas: ANDAGNDOAHGDLKHNKDLFHLKFDANGLKFDAGN????? *backflips to his feet in confusion*
*cue the rest of the fellowship losing their fucking minds*
after that heâs onto them and they never manage it again
from all i can gather this is entirely cannon except the fellowship hobbits didnt invent it, its been a traditional hobbit game on par with humans and âtagâ for about 500 plus years to the point the average human will routinely fail to notice an entire picnic of hobbits at ten feet, blanket and potato salad included like hobbits dont realize they legit have a supernatural ability to not be noticed on par with elves physics bending sniper scope vision
okay but is âpicnicâ the collective noun for hobbits because thatâs brilliant
a picnic of hobbits
perfection
So yeah, itâs canon that hobbits are the stealthiest of the races of Middle-Earth, even more so than elves. Which is an amusing trivia fact, until you start realizing how much of the plot of both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is based on this.
Why did Gandalf randomly decide that a plump gentle-hobbit was the right person to be a burglar for an adventuring party? It seems like wizardly eccentricity, until you realize Bilboâs got a racial bonus to Stealth of like +20. Why does he get the Ring? In text, itâs partly coincidence, but also - which party member do you give your Ring of Invisibility to? The Rogue with a crazy Stealth bonus, of course. Bilbo uses his Stealth, boosted by the Ring, constantly, and the dwarves would have been dead a dozen times over without it. Heâs able to get the Ring in the first place because he stealthed out of the middle of a horde of goblins. Then heâs sneaking up inches from trolls, secretly living inside the elvesâ freakin palace (with Legolas) for months, rescuing a whole pack of dwarves from under the elvesâ noses, regularly pick-pocketing people including elves, sneaking past a dragon, sneaking to deliver the Arkenstone.
Then we follow up into Lord of the Rings. Gandalfâs now bred up a second-generation Rogue. Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry have that same massive racial Stealth bonus, and Frodo also has been raised by an adventurer. He speaks Elvish fluently, heâs friends with dwarves, he studies maps obsessively. Then he inherits Bilboâs Stealth-boosting magic item - now upgraded to cursed McGuffin. When Gandalf decides itâs time, he collects Frodo and assembles a party. Their goal isnât to march into Mordor, or to battle the Boss: itâs to sneak through enemy lines, past an entire army (or two).
The humans, elf, dwarf, and wizard angel keep drawing too much attention and getting them attacked (plus admittedly Pippin, the low-WIS darling), so eventually Frodo and Sam ditch them and head off on a pure stealth run. They canât use the Ring of Invisibility anymore, but fortunately Galadriel gave them another Stealth-boosting magic item, the cloaks. They sneak halfway across Middle-Earth, past armies, through miles and miles of enemy territory, while being hunted by every evil being on the planet, particularly a literal giant All-Seeing Eye. Not to mention the Palantiri, extremely powerful divination items which are being actively used by three different groups of enemies/competitors.
The other main canonical Hobbit power is that theyâre âvery hardy folkâ, meaning they have incredibly high resistance to various things from poison to mental influence. So they can survive the literally poisonous air and water of Mordor, which was designed to kill every species but orcs. And they can survive close contact with the Ring for decades or centuries, not only physically but also maintaining some degree of mental independence, when any other race would succumb in minutes to hours. (Note the most âpowerfulâ characters - Elrond, Galadriel, the literal angel Gandalf - refuse to even touch the Ring, as do the most morally sound, Aragorn and Faramir.)
Why did Gandalf choose a minor member of the country gentry, the size of a toddler, with no combat training, to save Middle-Earth? Because absolutely no other creature on the planet could have done the task. Frodo was all but created as a weapon against Sauron. He, and he alone (with Sam), was capable of saving Middle-Earth.
TL;DR: Legolas would get jump-scared by Frodo every single time, because Frodo is the greatest Rogue in Middle-Earth, and the plot of the entire series depends on that fact.
Gonna print this out and staple it to the face of the next person who asks why they didnât just give the ring to the eagles to drop into the volcano. BECAUSE POISONOUS AIR AND AN ARMY WITH TREBUCHETS YOU TWIT.
Also SmĂ©agol/Gollum, mentioned by Gandalf to be a hobbit or close relative of hobbits. The elves canât catch him in Mirkwood, and this is after he lost the Ring and is out in the open for the first time in ~500 years.
i luv this concept so much lmao
just the idea of the hobbits playing hide and seek with the rest of the fellowship is so hilarious to meÂ
@unsteady-states !!!
It bugs me a little bit that The Ring canonically turned Isildur invisible.
Canonically, The Ringâs whole thing is that it enhances the pre-existing abilities of whomever wears it, in addition to driving them insane. This is why it would be so devastating for Gandalf, or Galadriel, etc to get their hands on it. Theyâre already super powerful, the buff would make them unstoppable.
And the stealth thing is established really early on in the Hobbit as the thing hobbits were amazing at. It would kick ass as a detail for The Ring to only turn Hobbits invisible. Among other points, it enhances the plot-point of Gandalf not being able to recognize the thing and then after his suspicions were raised taking so much time studying ring-lore before he could. If The Ring only turned Hobbits invisible, then Gandalf literally has nothing to go off of for identifying the damn thing until heâs gotten his PHD in Ring-ology. Which is canonically what it took for him to figure it out.
This is still plausible without the alteration to The Ringâs exact properties, but I feel that the narrative is a bit stronger with it.
Amusingly, as far as I can tell its also canon-compliant.
What the fuck does that mean, didnât I already say that Isildur is canonically turned invisible by The Ring? Ah, but you misunderstand the nature of Tolkienâs canon. The Hobbit exists within the fiction of The Hobbit. It is written by Bilbo, with Tolkien himself merely translating it from Westron to modern English. The Lord of The Rings is compiled by Frodo, the Silmarillion is a Noldor history book.
We know that The Ring turned Isildur invisible because of how he died; his party was ambushed on the road by orcs. Isildur donned The Ring and leapt into the river to escape. But The Ring betrayed him, enlarging itself on his finger and falling off, thus allowing the orcs to see him and fill him with arrows.
Except.
Thatâs the translation of what happened, and we donât know how reliable the original source was in any case. Recall that ordinary humans are already remarkably resistant to death by injuries that would fell other creatures, and Isidur was a full-blooded Numenorean besides. It is entirely plausible that The Rings enhancement of these properties would make Isildur very difficult to kill indeed. Maybe he was already full of arrows when he went into the River, but his wounds only became fatal retroactively, with the loss of The Ring.
Perhaps the âoriginal textâ Watsonian-Tolkien was translating more simply indicated that Isildur went into the river, was betrayed by The Ring, and this caused his immediate death-by-arrows. Watsonian-Tolkien could, in this case, be forgiven for assuming that it was a matter of loosing the invisibility which The Ring emparts to so many Hobbits in the texts Watsonian-Tolkien has read which led to Isildurâs death.
Alternatively, it could have been the mistake of an earlier chronicler or transcriber whose error Watsonian-Tolkien was simply passing on.
