It's Old May Day, and as promised, here's the Four of Pentacles from the never-completed Tarot deck, Mordred at the end of the Battle of Camlann (he is described at the end of Malory, Le Morte D'Arthur, as "leaning on his sword among a great heap of dead men").
Discerning readers of The Lion Hunters will recognize his physical depiction here as matching that of Medraut, and the VERY discerning among you will guess, or be entertained to know, that he is intentionally standing here among a great heap of dead Lleus. I am struggling a bit to remember who they all are. I *think* the one with his arm over the rock is Gwyn from Alan Garner's The Owl Service. The one with the flowing golden locks is certainly Lleu Llaw Gyffes of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion. I *think* that the one on the right is an early gender-fluid boy-magician character of mine named Lleu Enle, and the shiny-haired guy in the lower left is Lleu ap Artos.
I also have always felt that they might not actually be dead, but posing. Lleu Llaw Gyffes just doesn't look like he's taking this seriously.
Happy birthday, my marksman!
Are audiobooks a scam? Like, do people really understand written language when listening to it. I can listen to podcasts for hours on end and feel like I'm following, because it's spoken language and I can understand that. But I genuinely do not understand written language if it's not on the page. I have only one friend who has confirmed this so far, and she has a PhD, but everyone only gets one vote
Can you understand a book in audiobook format if you have never read that book yourself?
I can understand new-to-me written text in spoken form, even text-to-speech
I can understand spoken word but not audiobooks
I can understand if the text is simple and the narrator is good
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Lion Hunters Series - Elizabeth Wein
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Goewin & Medraut (The Lion Hunters), Goewin & Telemakos Meder
Characters: Goewin (The Lion Hunters), Medraut (The Lion Hunters), Telemakos Meder, Turunesh Kidane
Additional Tags: Epistolary, Absence
Series: Part 4 of The Waste Land
Summary:
Hi all! I’m starting to get ready for running ScotSwap 2026, a Lymond Chronicles fanfic and fanart exchange!
This is a minimum 1k fic/clean line drawing exchange with 2.5 months to create
Last year we ran sign-ups at the start of April and had submissions due in mid-July, which was decided by running a poll for potential participants’ preferred timelines.
If you think you might want to make art or fic for this exchange, please vote!
Even if you don’t, please reblog to signal boost!
Here in this small fandom I want to make sure it gets as far as wide as I can, and the most people are able to participate!
What should the timeline be for ScotSwap 2026?
Signups in April; assignments in May; works due mid-July
Signups in May; assignments in June; works due mid-August
Signups in June; assignments in July; works due mid-September
Signups in July; assignments in August; works due mid-October
Signups in August; assignments in September; works due mid-November
Signups in September; assignments in October; works due mid-December
Voting ended onMar 17
Tagging a bunch of last year’s participants and people who mentioned maybe wanting to in future years, plus other Lymond fandom people I can think of off the top of my head who might want to boost, but again please spread around even if you aren’t on here! I’m just going off a mental Rolodex of people in the fandom, and I’m sure I’m missing a bunch because I’m just one person. Feel free to tag anyone else you think might be interested :)
Today’s Caturday mood? The Pallas’ cat (Otocolobus manul). During the day, this fluffy feline sleeps or hides, preferring to hunt under the cover of darkness. This species, which inhabits parts of Central Asia, lives a primarily solitary life and only seeks out company during mating season. A female Pallas’ cat produces a litter of one to six kittens, and by just 5 months old, they disperse to set out on their own.
i think we need to take the adjective “adult” away from porn and from twee lifehack tiktokers bc there are some emotional experiences that simply do not happen to you in your teens and i have no other way to describe them
example: my grandpa passed away last year, and my mom is still in the long process of dealing with his stuff. i was helping her dig through some boxes and found this thick leather bound notebook. she said yeah, that’s his address book. i don’t know how to throw it away. i said okay, i’m taking it. it’s mine now, not your problem. and it was obviously a relief for her, letting me take this book full of decades and decades of her dad’s handwriting and allow herself to passively believe that it isn’t gone, even if she intellectually understands otherwise. but i couldn’t throw it away either. and it ended up in yet another box that moved with me to my new apartment and got shuffled around from pile to pile until i finally thought, no, this wasn’t the deal. i owe it to my mother to feel this sadness, to perform this tiny sliver of mourning for her so that she doesn’t have to, and by hoarding this useless object i’m not holding up my side of the bargain. so i threw it away, and i felt sad, but a lighter kind of sadness. now that’s adult
A number of studies show that various vaccines (shingles, RSV, flu) are associated with “off-target” benefits like reduced cardiovascular risk, lower rates of dementia, and lower Alzheimer’s risk for older people.
Cassandra: YOU ARE ALL GOING TO REGRET THIS SO MUCH YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW.
Odysseus: Regret it why?
Cassandra: You won’t believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.
Odysseus: … I’m Nobody. Fill me in.
*A couple of months later*
Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, she’s great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother who’s not going to treat you like shit.
Penelope: … I’m going to need more details, but okay, sure.
depression for me: staying in bed, vague tweeting about the wreckage that is my emotional state, ordering lots of take out.
depression for a Dunnett protagonist: wears all black, covered head to toe in jewels, VIVIDLY expensive, travels to a foreign country, haughty and cold and severe as all hell, taking no shit and taking no prisoners. maybe an eagle.
[“In 2011 Dr. Kerri Johnson, an assistant professor of communication studies and psychology at UCLA, released the findings of an innovative study on perceptions of gender and emotion. “It’s okay—even expected—for men to express anger,” she said. “But when women have a negative emotion, they’re expected to express their displeasure with sadness.”
Sex bias leads us to see happiness and fear on women’s faces more easily, categorizing women’s neutral faces as less angry than men’s faces. In studies, women’s neutral faces are described as “submissive,” “innocent,” “scared,” and “happy.” In one, women’s faces were labelled by participants as “cooperative” and “babyish.” Multiple experiments reveal that an angry woman’s face is one of the most difficult for people to parse, and an androgynous face with an angry expression is overwhelmingly categorized as male.
A “sad” woman and an “angry” man might be experiencing similar negative emotions, but these words, and the stereotypes they elicit, produce radically different outcomes. The difference is not trivial.
Power, considered by some theorists to be the “entrance requirement” for anger, is not necessary for sadness. Anger is an “approach” emotion, while sadness is a “retreat” emotion. Thinking of a person as sad makes us see them as weaker and more submissive. Anger, not sadness, is associated with controlling one’s circumstances, such as competition, independence, and leadership. Anger, not sadness, is linked to assertiveness, persistence, and aggressiveness. Anger, not sadness, is a way to actively make change and confront challenges. Anger, not sadness, leads to perceptions of higher status and respect. Like happy people, angry people are more optimistic, feeling that change is possible and that they can influence outcomes. Sad and fearful people tend toward pessimism, feeling powerless to make change.
Social science researchers Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu, and Bernard Nijstad have shown that anger, unlike sadness, encourages “unstructured thinking” when a person is engaged in creative tasks, and that people who are angry are better at generating more ideas. Even more interesting, one study found that the ideas they came up with were highly original.
There are cognitive benefits to sadness, however. For example, sadness often means that a person is thinking more deeply and methodically about what is upsetting her; sad people tend to consider social ills instead of assigning individual blame. Sad people are also more generous. On the downside, sadness can easily turn into paralyzing rumination, lowered expectations, and costly impatience. Sad people expect and are satisfied with less.
What does separating anger from femininity mean for us as women? For one thing, it means that we render women’s anger ineffective as a personal or collective public resource. This treatment of women’s anger is a powerful regulation; an ideal way to reduce women’s pushback against their own inequality.”]
soraya chemaly, from rage becomes her: the power of women’s anger, 2018
I scrolled through 89 pages of godisafujishi's blog to find the context. Someone argued that "good morning" is inherently sexual because of morning wood so the /nsx tone tag is appropriate clarification when typing that to someone
https://www.tumblr.com/godisafujoshi/797030532456284160/everyday-i-learn-of-new-strawmen-becoming-fleshmen
To be fair, you can’t carefully calculate Vimes. Vimes is a shotgun solution that you point in the general direction of a problem, and he’ll solve the problem and anything in the blast radius of that problem
The upshot of this is that he winds up getting way more done than you were expecting - “Ah, Commander. Back in one piece, I see. How did the coronation go?”
“The Low King has publicly advocated for the rights of trolls and female dwarfs, the guards of Bonk have restructured into a proper watch force, the power of the werewolf clans has been divided, and we have an excellent trade deal on fat with Uberwald.”
That’s an interesting one, the parallels between Detritus’s crossbow and Vimes himself are not something I’d ever have considered otherwise. The Piecemaker/Keeper Of Thee Kinge’s Piece. Both known for leaving holes in walls.
And, most importantly, it’s Vimes who sets the boundaries on when Detritus is allowed to use the crossbow, and the same goes for his own anger. He takes responsibility for both, because he won’t allow collateral damage. I’m not sure where I’m going with this train of thought but it’s just something to think about.
Vimes has canonically forbidden Detritus from using the Piecemaker on people (and presumably also dwarves, trolls, etc). That means it’s a weapon against property, which often translates to being a weapon against power.
i’m fairly certain the utterance ‘people and also dwarves and trolls’ would get you into some serious hot water in the late-game Ankh Morpork City Watch
"comparing apples and oranges" has always been funny to me as an expression because people's go to exampe of two things so radically different that they defy any useful comparison are apples. and oranges. like you would struggle to find a more comparable pair of objects than that. theyre literally sold right next to each other in most stores.
Concerning (things about) Hobbits: Meeting the Big Man
One of the most important characters in Lord of the Rings is someone you like and trust. You quote him often, remember him fondly, and rely on his word.
You don't know his name. Fanart is nonexistent; there’s no Ao3 tag, no breakout film portrayal, no Amazon money-milking series for this character. You know his voice, have memorised his words; you've probably never read any meta about him.
I'll bet I’m the only person you've seen on Tumblr who really talks about That Fucking Guy, and I hate that man with a cold academic passion. (I also love him. He's my blorbo. He could be yours.)
I think you shouldn't trust him as much as you do.
Here is why.
This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history...
That is the first sentence of The Fellowship of the Ring.
The prologue of the Lord of the Rings is iconic. Swept away by the story, we forget we’re reading at all. It's understandable. Who can resist the overwhelming charm of the writer, and the bewildering excitement of being taken by the hand and invited into The Fellowship of the Ring.
But even people with deeper takes on Tolkien tend to miss the significance of the Prologue. It’s a place where critical reading abilities and political processors usually turn off entirely - fair enough, it's probably a relief.
Let's talk about the Narrator.
Meeting the Narrator: Time, Place, Person
The Prologue is narrated by a Mannish (Big Folk) Narrator, a modern human being, from an accessible academic standpoint. We are encouraged to think of him as Friendly Professor Tolkien, although you really do need to remember that he is clearly addressing us from within a fictional narrative world. He is a character. Even if he is Tolkien’s self-insert, intended to be read as Tolkien Himself, he is still a character who can be analysed and interpreted. This is a fictional character.
The Big Man deliberately addresses the reader as someone with a shared background, in what is presumably somewhere in the early-to-mid twentieth century. It is stated multiple times that you (reader) and Narrator are both Big Folk together - there is no chance that you, the Reader, are a scholar of another race.
It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves.
Pick out the “later estrangement” and park it for now.
The casting of the Narrator is a deliberate alignment with Professor Tolkien, and we are certainly intended to understand him as an academic, avuncular, rather unworldly male professor in the British Isles.
(Sidebar: for convenience I gender the Narrator as male. I think there's evidence for the Narrator being intended as male-by-default, which can be provided on request, and I personally feel the Big Man narrator is the translator/propagator of the silly convention of referring to modern humans as “capital-M Men.” )
The Prologue is written charmingly, a framing device of an academic translator giving the context of background information before presenting someone else’s text (the translated Red Book, etc). Later, this Prologue connects to the Appendices in The Return of the King, where the Narrator returns in his persona of the translator of the works. Our Narrator is certainly a strong, influential, deliberate character, with a specific and distinctive voice!
Anyway, whether or not you choose to picture the Big Man Narrator as Tolkien Himself doing a folksy Bit, OR as a character Tolkien created - Remember! The entire story is fiction and the Big Man Narrator is a created fictional character. Why would you assume he is telling the truth? Why assume that he is an expert? Where are his biases?
Look what the Big Man Narrator actually says. Look at what he chooses to tell, and what he finds unimportant. There are so, so many posts that pick over the fascinating bits of Concerning Hobbits, mining canon for more information, as if it is a pure source of truth. I suggest that the next time you do, you try this fun exercise.
Before we go into the Magic Thing, the narrator also notes AGAIN that hobbits exist today, but are shorter than they were;
They seldom now reach three feet; but they have dwindled, they say, and in ancient days they were taller.
This continues and reinforces the framing of “hobbits still exist now,” and sounds rather as if the Big Man has interviewed modern hobbits (“they say,”) which we’ll also park.
We move on, parking "it's assumed you're a Man, receiving information from a Mannish professor", the "future estrangement" and "diminished hobbits are available for interview."
The Magic Thing
I was provoked into writing this by a fun Tumblr post pointing out that "hobbits are said to 'not study magic' - does that mean that they don't HAVE magic?" which went off into a separate and funnier reblog chain.
I want to analyse this again, noting that this is information received from Big Man.
Let’s examine the “hobbit magic thing” noting that we are being TOLD all of this by a CHARACTER.
Here’s how the passage about "hobbit magic" starts.
Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today;
In our time, we’ve just been told, hobbits still exist, but had a population drop and are vanishing. To the point where a reader is not expected to have ever heard of them. Chillingly, in typical mid century British academic fashion, the Big Folk Narrator assumes that the reader is also British; when he later mentions that the remaining hobbits only live in the British Isles, it’s a little alarming. There’s a species of humans native to these islands, so rare and so politically silent that you’ve never seen or heard of them.
Hello?!
for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.
We are told here that Hobbits are going extinct because they cannot readily survive due to, essentially, habitat destruction. (we feel the Narrator’s annoyance about the Industrial Revolution spoiling the “peace and quiet” strongly here, more strongly than the buried implications for indigenous people).
They no longer have any land. Not only have they lost the Shire, they have no towns, small villages or even farms. “Was” is very much past-tense, and they “haunted” land in the past, ghosting lightly and leaving no traces of their presence, rather than living there. so in our modern day there’s certainly no Shire, no Bree (mixed human/hobbit town) and no Michel Delving, which in its time was a market town with above-ground buildings and a museum. For context, it takes a decent amount of work for the British Isles to lose towns, especially on the level of development that Hobbits had - famously anachronistic, they have waistcoat buttons and watermills and good china and museums and smoking habits, while all the rest of medieval-ish Middle Earth is not as developed.
It’s hard to lose all that, without any trace at all, in crowded countries. Wholesale loss always means that Something Happened.
They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.
“Do not and did not” is further reinforcement of a still-living people. (I love the “understand or like” thing, which is charming - the implication that hobbits are perfectly capable of UNDERSTANDING machinery in textile factories, but would hate it.)
Something that makes the Big Man nuanced as a character is that he obviously adores hobbits, and studies them because he likes them. The fondness and admiration comes through, even as he is showing his own privilege and bias.
To me, the way this passage about machinery is framed - lumping together those machines as “about the level of technology hobbits are comfortable with” - is something that someone standing post-Enlightenment, probably post-Industrial Revolution, would do. The implication I take from this passage is that this is a modern writer describing the current status of modern hobbits; a mid-century British scholar, a self-insert of Tolkien.
This sense of time matters, because of everything else he says, and the temptation people will have to excuse the Big Man narrator as “a product of his time.” This isn’t a medieval writer looking back on Middle Earth. It’s a highly educated man writing in the 1940s: computers existed, there were several Disney films out, women had the right to vote, and feminist essays were published from Tolkien's own workplace.
Even in ancient days they were, as a rule, shy of ‘the Big Folk’, as they call us,
We then proceed to see, across three books, examples of hobbit behavior in “the ancient days”, which may serve as an example of this shyness. Several different relationship with Big Folk are outlined, in which fairly chirpy hobbits, characterised by their ready emotional availability, cohesion, and incredible abilities to build relationships and form massive political alliances, seem to do well on the strength of that. Hobbit shyness may involve glaring ferociously at Big Folk for a moment, but within a few days they are sitting on your lap, and then it’s all over. With this evidence in our memory, casting a coy “shyness” as the reason for their avoidance of “us” becomes uncomfortable.
and now they avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find.
The Narrator is handwaving, in avuncular fashion, why the Reader has never seen a hobbit in their lives, and needs to be lectured, from first principles, on a living indigenous people of the British Isles. Do marinate on it for a moment, though. The tone of a professor or a parent, whimsically explaining to Victorian children why you don’t see the Tooth Fairy - she hides! Teehee.
They avoid us with dismay.
Behind this airy statement, what happened? Massive betrayals, the loss of their land and political power, loss of the conditions they need for their survival, massive loss of their people, and a total breakdown in trust. Humans and hobbits, in the prologue and main story, are shown as natural allies; close kin who understand each other well; humans are shown owing a tremendous amount of their own political influence to hobbits, and even cold/reserved humans end up liking them after a conversation. Hobbits are especially shown for being loyal friends who do not break down under war; noted for retaining cohesion and resisting corruption; who, under unimaginable conditions, will still resist harming or betraying friends.
Hobbits and humans have clearly had some significant breakage of our kinship since the events of the LotR cycle. The Big Man knows this.
Earlier in the essay, when the Big Man told us that “hobbits are closest to (us)” he gave us a lot of additional information, didn’t he? He refers to “later estrangement.” (He also tells us clearly, in that subtext of that sentence, that no hobbit will ever read the book in our hands, no hobbit will ever be addressed as a reader, no hobbit will enter academia, no hobbit will be able to fill in the gaps that the Big Man waves his hand over. Certainly no hobbit scholar contributed to the Big Man’s translation of the Red Book. They’re not just going, they’re functionally GONE. This is what I mean!) Anyway, even the Big Man notes that there was “an estrangement.” Something that has caused them to flee from contact with us in dismay.
whatever happened in that estrangement probably doesn’t reflect well on the Big Folk. A species facing extinction and hiding, dismayed and estranged, from their closest kin, is not having a pleasant time on this earth. Especially when we understand that they’re basically trapped in the crowded and inhospitable British Isles (and still managing to hide from us to the point of the public not being aware of their existence!)
The Big Man Narrator isn’t interested. This is the point where you ought to start wondering about academic bias on the part of the Big Man Narrator. He's fond of hobbits, and has interviewed/met them, but would never treat one as a colleague.
[…]They possessed from the first the art of disappearing swiftly and silently, when large folk whom they do not wish to meet come blundering by; and this art they have developed until to Men it may seem magical.
so hobbits have an inherent ability of being invisible/undetectable, which they still practice today (teehee, that’s why it’s okay that you’ve never spoken to one) and which is pretty damn effective. Effective enough that people in modern times are completely fooled, effective enough that it still counts as “disappearing,” and the elusiveness of hobbits is so perfect as to conceal their existence from the general public. Effective enough that the few adults who DO discuss hobbits could conceivably think it could be magic. The Narrator has probably rolled his eyes over a rival’s paper about “Slipping Into The Shadow-Realm: how hobbits shift space and time to conceal their vital signatures” (Sayers, 1934).
further, they’ve specifically developed this “art” - from what’s implied to be an instinctive/animal ability - to a higher skill, indistinguishable from magic. The “art” is SOMETHING material and quantifiable, if it was innate-and-continually-developed.
But Hobbits have never, in fact, studied magic of any kind,
Here is a point that’s been discussed on tumblr, and it is correct to note that “studied” is doing a lot of work. Especially when contrasted against the previous sentence, with the interesting term “art”. “It isn’t science/magic, it’s an instinctive art”.
To me - remembering that this is intended to be a mid-century British academic speaking to us - it resonates with how romanticism of marginalised cultures was treated by academia, in the generation the Big Man Narrator would’ve studied in - full of romantic, unexamined, politically revealing statements like, “The Celts are skilled in the art of music, but have never properly studied it.”
What I’m saying here is that we should not assume the Big Man is a good judge of the difference between “art” and “study,” especially since the next bit reads:
and their elusiveness is due solely to a professional skill that heredity and practice, and a close friendship with the earth, have rendered inimitable by bigger and clumsier races.
Hobbit invisibility is an “art” through “heredity,” but also a “professional skill” refined through “practice.” It has been “developed” until it is mistaken for “magic,” but against this, we are told that hobbits “have never studied magic of any kind.” In the cleavage point here, we can see the definition of “study” that The Big Man is working with. This definition is possibly what makes something “magic” or not. Have you seen this before?
The point I am making here is that the Big Man is speaking to us from the position of a “coloniser.” There are some worldbuilding implications to unpack from this. One is that the Big Man is speaking from a place where magic can be studied, not even requiring hereditary aptitude (if hobbits were excluded from magic by physiology, This Fuckin Guy would’ve said it) but that it is an academic practice. Hobbits are not just nearly-extinct and terrified out of contact with humans; they are fully excluded from academia (they do not translate or contribute to translations of their histories; they do not study) and if they cannot formalise their practices in acceptable study as the Big Man defines it, it cannot be magic. This is exactly the tone in which majority cultures dismiss other practices of culture/medicine/science, by stating it is NOT a form of science, because it is not practiced with the academy, because it is definitionally not allowed in the academy.
We can then go to a higher level of political analysis and reading, and ask: who benefits from a definition of “magic” that includes (academic study) but excludes (hobbit arts)?
You can certainly do some delightful worldbuilding answers for yourself, and say that “perhaps magic is spells, material changes, great works as performed by Elvish or Maiar Ringbearers, etc.” But if we look at the political stuff I’ve just pointed out, why not examine the definition and who it serves and why? Given that we’ve seen this pattern before - colonisers deliberately bundle, define and dismiss marginalised practices as primitive, animalistic, instinctual and unschooled, as part of the PURPOSEFUL WORK of colonisation - I read the Big Man definition as: “Magic is formalised by the bigger races and defined by excluding the practices of the smallest race.”
Who does this benefit? Well, the Bigger Races could in some ways. Magic must be studied, hobbits don’t study, hobbits don’t have magic, hobbits are The Only Unmagical Humans - despite having practices indistinguishable from magic - this could be something. Big Men would have some reason to define “magic” to exclude hobbits. Normally this is done in order to take resources or drain resistance from marginalised people, but as hobbits have had virtually no remaining resources or resistance since long before the Industrial Revolution, you could open this up to other worldbuilding implications - maybe, Big Men didn’t really MIND hobbits going extinct.
An interesting point here is to re-read sections of this work with different interpretations of who the Big Man is. Where are his biases? Who is he as a character?
I personally read him as a friendly, Tolkienesque academic who likes hobbits, follows his linguistic interests, and is too blinded by his bias to think about their political position. He seems unaware of the horrors he's talking about. Perhaps that's down to innocence.
A character crying out to be analysed.
Landless and Dismayed
That sums up a lot of information that can be mined from one of the very first paragraphs of the Fellowship of the Ring. But here's another message to toy with - hobbits exist in the modern space; landless, estranged, fleeing from us in dismay. Quite likely to have been betrayed.
That said I'm going to have to push back on "for context, it takes a good deal of work for the British Isles to lose towns", because it doesn't, actually? The are towns and villages named as recently as the 1700s which are not only no longer on the map, but very difficult to locate at all - and despite their technology levels, the Hobbits of LotR are implied to be centuries (at least) before that.
One of the things about Britain being crowded and densely populated is that it makes it easier to lose settlements, because part or all of a town is very quickly over-built by other stuff.
Which fits really well with the sense described here of big Men displacing and appropriating the land of Hobbits. Also brings in some really interesting parallels with the inclosure (/enclosure) of common land in the 18th and 19th century - perhaps Hobbits' traditional autonomy and rights were a casualty of something similar?
I have to climb on my soapbox, maybe just to shout a couple of lines but I feel like I am holding a puzzle piece here: It's the early writing of the Gypsy Lore Society (I can almost guarantee that Tolkien, as a linguist, would have read it) and every single thing said about the hobbits is also said about Gypsies in Scotland, Wales and England.
As the, uh, Hobbit in this situation, I'm talking in the context of the UK specifically here, which is where the GLS drew many of its first members from - It's an all-gorjer institution (or, was, for much of its existence) but the general thrust of its raison d'etre was:
- There are Gypsies in the woods, less of them today than in former generations. Your ancestors would have met them often and worked with them, but you will probably never see one.
- They look different now to in the past, they tell stories that they used to be beautiful and stately and descend from kings, but now they're a shadow of themselves.
- They speak a fascinating language which is degrading fast, and they see themselves as the last of their line.
- They and their way of life have been doomed by the industrial revolution, so they don't trust us any more and we don't trust them.
- They don't use machines more complicated than the fire-bellows or the accordion.
- They don't introspect, they don't know their own history, and they aren't involved in the academic chronicling of their own people - An academic researcher might know some Gypsies (Smart and Crofton, I am looking at you with the evil eye, I am spitting in your path) and talk to them regularly, but won't consider them an academic co-writer (EVEN IF THE ROM IN QUESTION WROTE THE WHOLE BOOK AND CROFTON JUST SAT AMANUENSIS, WESTER BOSWELL I WILL HAVE JUSTICE FOR YOU) and there is no chance of a Gypsy reading the paper, going to the university, etc.
- The tone is very fond and sad but of course these relics are dying out, it's just the way of the world, modernity eh?
- They previously left their mark on the landscape (atchin tans, horse fairs, etc) but those things are smaller now, lesser, invisible, scattered. Enclosure was part of that as @mangled-by-disuse points out (which destroyed a LOT of rural life here!) And also specific laws around trading, stopping, gathering, and use of public space by Gypsies specifically. Our architecture was of no use to Lords or railway companies or later motorway builders (even though we and Irish Travellers were employed in huge numbers to build the modern road network!) So we got demolished in the process of "improving transit".
- They are closely related to "us" (English people) but in an earlier age - This is around when both the Indo-European roots of Romanes and the theories around Proto-Indo-European really came to academic attention. As a linguist, the idea of a very "eastern" branch of the IE family being creoled (well, paralanguaged) with a very "western" branch, via a physical migration of people, is catnip.
- They don't study (magic? Anything!) But are very naturally skilled at some things to the point that it looks like magic (Graimengro, especially - who of course IRL learn their skills as soon as they can hold their head up on their necks - but also the association of Gypsies and "magic" in the real world is... Strong... And often especially in the early C20th and late C19th was contrasted with western occultism that was "more learned" - I think it's Leland who collected a lot about "Gypsy Magic" for a gorjer audience and he's a good place to start reading on gorjer attitudes to... All of that.)
I am wracking my brains but I feel like Concerning Hobbits DIRECTLY pastiches an individual GLS paper too... I'll probably remember in a few months.
Mea culpa @elodieunderglass I have written another essay about Gypsies in your mentions, this was not deliberate, I hadn't even realised it was you again!
I don’t mind! You might be interested in the material about the “Wandering Days” of hobbits - prior to settling the Shire, they “wandered” - and the commentary about them “forgetting” their native language.
“Hobbits came from nowhere and forgot their early histories - the silly things forgot their own language! And their diverse-and-distinctive-sounding names, hinting at strands of different internal cultures, were actually the Default Language they used in the absence of their own” feels like a really loaded series of decisions to make. And probably quite interesting in the context of how Tolkien would have thought about travelling peoples! I need to learn more about it, thank you so much
EDIT: should say in this case, which is a self-identified capital-G Gypsy in the UK (dykepuffs) speaking to someone in the UK who knows slightly more than average about GRTB+ politics, about those politics, it isn’t a slur (and don’t worry, it’s not a problem. Protect yourself if you have to, I know what it’s like in the Panopticon.) But fun fact: travelling people are very much a living political force in the UK!
