The Unofficial Hobbit Handbook Read online

  Lembas, Elvish Waybread

  The elves have their own version of dwarvish cram: lembas. In appearance it’s similar to cram. However, it’s far tastier and more nutritious, and it stays good pretty well forever. As an added advantage, orcs (and Gollum) don’t like its taste or smell, so they’re not likely to eat up your supplies if you’re captured (although if you’re captured by orcs, food is likely to be the least of your problems).

  WAYBREAD BLUEBERRY TART

  If, by some chance, you happen to come across a large supply of lembas, consider using it as the basis of other cooking. Here’s a quick recipe for Waybread Blueberry Tart:

  Crust:

  2 cups lembas, crumbled

  1⁄2 cup shortening

  Filling:

  11⁄2 cup blueberries, rinsed

  1⁄2 cup brown sugar

  1⁄4 pound butter

  1⁄3 cup blueberry jam

  Mix the lembas with the shortening until thick. Press into the bottom of a tart pan. Bake over an open fire until firm (30 minutes, moving to avoid scorching) or in a closed oven at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.

  Mix blueberries with jam, and fill tart. Sprinkle lightly with brown sugar and dot with butter. Return to fire or oven and bake until done

  Guaranteed to keep the biggest man, elf, or dwarf on his feet for two days. Guaranteed to keep a hobbit on his feet and away from the dinner table for three hours.

  Men

  Humans have varying tastes in food, depending on where they’re from. In the south, near Gondor, foods tend to be more heavily spiced than in the north. This difference reflects the trade between Gondor and other lands such as Rhûn and Harad.

  Rangers such as Aragorn are skilled hunters, and meat is an important part of their diets. If you fall in with a party of men, expect a lot of venison (or possibly mutton) roasted on a spit. You’ll also find dried fruit, nuts, and cheese. If you eat in one of the higher houses in Minas Tirith, you’ll be offered wine and white cakes, along with other well-prepared fare.

  Wines of Minas Tirith

  Wines in the south of Middle-earth are stronger and earthier than the wines of the north. Southerners prefer red to white and spicy to bland. Minas Tirith is well known for its cellars, and the people of the city are wine connoisseurs of some note. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by the White City for a wine tasting. You won’t be sorry.

  Dining With the Beornings

  Beorn, the huge man (possibly part giant) who keeps open the passes of Mirkwood, is a vegetarian, subsisting mostly on clotted cream, bread, and honey. He evidently doesn’t object to the eating of flesh, as he gives the dwarves bows before they set out on their trek through the forest. But he himself doesn’t eat it. There isn’t word on whether this custom has passed to his descendants, but one presumes they keep up his custom of maintaining bee fields, filled with giant bees as big as hobbits.

  If you happen to stop by the house of the Beornings to take afternoon tea, don’t baffle and offend your host by asking for the pork pies and sausages. Just eat your cream and honey and bread, and enjoy it.

  Ents

  Ents deserve a special mention because of the remarkable qualities of their drink. Ents don’t eat—or at least no one’s ever recorded the sighting of such a thing. But they drink a variety of drinks. Some Ent beverages are like wine and can intoxicate the unwary. Others are like a liquid meal, more satisfying and filling than sitting at board for hours with solid food. Ents, it must be presumed, brew the drinks themselves through some semimagical process. On hobbits, at least, these drinks have a considerable effect, making even fully mature hobbits grow between four and six inches in a matter of several weeks.

  How to Drink With the Ents

  Keeping in mind that Ents are at least twice (and possibly three times) as tall as you, the first rule is to be polite. Nothing angers an Ent more than someone who’s rude—except perhaps someone who’s careless with an axe. Second, drink slowly. Third, plan to order new clothes and shoes in a larger size.

  Meals in the Shire

  In Middle-earth, hobbits are the people most concerned with food and drink and the proper times for each. Since food is one of the centerpieces of their culture, they have elaborate rituals concerning it. (Other people have rituals, too—for instance, the people of Gondor, before each meal, face the West for a moment of silence in tribute to Elvenhome.)

  First Breakfast

  The hobbit day starts with breakfast, usually at about eight o’clock in the morning. A typical hobbit breakfast will include:

  Bacon

  Eggs

  More bacon

  Cereal

  Coffee

  Ham

  Stewed tomatoes

  First breakfast serves to wake up the hobbit and make sure he’s ready to face the long day ahead—a day of possibly laboring in the fields to grow more food to sustain him in his quest to grow more food.

  After breakfast, there’s the washing up; water has to be hauled from the well and heated, and dishes need to be scrubbed and set to dry in the rack. This is wearing work, and afterwards the typical hobbit needs some sustenance.

  Second Breakfast

  Second breakfast, usually taken at 10:30 a.m., can be eaten on the front lawn on nice days or possibly in the dining room by an open window. It includes:

  Kippered herring

  Sausages

  Toast and marmalade

  Tea

  Tarts

  Fried slice

  More tea

  After that’s been consumed and a pipe or two smoked, it’s time to clean up the second set of breakfast dishes. At this point, it’s time for Morning Tea, or Elevenses.

  Elevenses

  This is a light snack, intended to keep a hardworking hobbit going for a bit until lunchtime. It includes:

  Scones

  Biscuits

  Tea

  Elevenses shouldn’t take very long—from 11 to possibly 11:45 a.m., leaving a decent interval between the end of this meal and luncheon, which should be served at about 12:30. (Note that in Gondor, Elevenses is sometimes referred to as Nuncheon and is partaken by Knights of the City who have risen with first light and haven’t eaten since the previous evening’s meal. Very few hobbits ever become Knights of the City. Only one, in fact, and he complained a lot about the irregularity of meals.)

  Luncheon

  This is a significant meal, but it’s often taken at a nearby pub, since the hobbit is exhausted from his morning efforts of cooking first breakfast, second breakfast, and elevenses. A hobbit lunch consists of:

  Meat pies

  Cucumber salad

  Stewed tomatoes

  Sausages

  Sandwiches

  Hard-boiled eggs

  Ale—lots of ale

  This is accompanied by the after-luncheon pipe (see page 17) and a short nap to recover his strength.

  Tea

  Teatime in the Shire is practically a religion. Bilbo, when he first goes away with the dwarves, is shocked to discover himself in places where people have never even heard of teatime.

  No hobbit is ever really happy unless he or she is within calling distance of a tea kettle. (Bilbo, on the first part of his journey, keeps imagining himself back in his hole with the kettle just beginning to sing on the hob.) But tea consists of much more than the beverage alone. We can form a proper idea of it from the tea Bilbo is forced to give the dwarves and Gandalf when they appear on his doorstep at Bag End:

  Tea

  Ale

  Tarts

  Jam

  Cheese

  Eggs

  Cold chicken

  Pickles

  Biscuits

  Seed-cake

  Buttered scones

  Meat pies

  Fruit pies

  Beer

  Wine

  More tea

  (Note that Bilbo doesn’t have any difficulty in supplying this enormous amount of food to the party; it’s just that the sud
denness of it surprises him. It empties out his larders—a good thing, considering that he’s going to be out of town for the next year.)

  Tea lasts from about 4 p.m. until 6 p.m. After that, there’s time for cleaning up and then, later, supper.

  Supper

  After the enormous tea, supper is a light meal. Nothing too strenuous this late at night. It includes:

  Roast pork

  Bread

  Ham

  Mince-pie

  Vegetables

  Cheese

  Wine

  Ale

  And so, to bed. This list doesn’t include late-night snacks and sudden fits of midnight munchies, to which many hobbits are subject.

  Food for the Average Hobbit

  If, by chance, you find yourself with a hobbit houseguest, you’ll have to change your food purchasing habits. Here is the minimum of what you’ll need for a hobbit for a seven-day week:

  Bread (four loaves)

  Jam (two jars)

  Honey (one jar)

  Eggs (three dozen)

  Pies—meat (five)

  Pies—fruit (three)

  Bacon (five rashers)

  Cheese (two large wheels)

  Assorted fruits

  Chicken (two)

  Beef roast (one, large)

  Pickles

  Beer (one and a half barrels)

  Wine (half a cask)

  Coffee (three gallons)

  If the hobbit is young, say, still in his or her tweens—increase these amounts by half.

  Pipeweed

  Pipeweed is the one pleasure that hobbits claim exclusively for themselves. Indeed, although Gandalf, Aragorn, and Gimli all smoke, they all seem to agree that pipeweed is grown exclusively in the Shire; even Saruman, when he wants to smoke, has to send away for Longbottom Leaf, rather than try to grow his own.

  It so happens we know quite a bit about pipeweed, since Meriadoc Brandybuck wrote a short essay on the subject in the introduction to Herblore of the Shire.

  True Pipeweed

  The first true pipeweed of the Shire was grown by Tobold Hornblower in 1070 (Shire Reckoning), about 350 years before the War of the Ring. So hobbits had had a considerable amount of time to practice smoking. Tobold almost certainly got the plant from a hillside near Bree, so pipeweed had its actual origin outside the Shire. However, it’s the hobbits of the Fourth Farthings who perfected it and cultivated it to its current state.

  Meriadoc notes that pipeweed actually grows in the south, around Gondor, but the people of Minas Tirith don’t know what to do with it and “esteem it only for the fragrance of its flowers.” (The people of Minas Tirith are generally ignorant of the powers of various herbs, as witnessed by their ignorance regarding the medicinal properties of kingsfoil in the aftermath of the Battle of the Pelinnor Fields.)

  Varieties of Leaf

  The only pipeweed we know much about is Longbottom Leaf, made by the Hornblower family. However, as with beer, each district in the Shire has its own favored pipeweed that it swears by. Meriadoc and Pippin smoke Longbottom Leaf because that’s what they find in the ruins of Isengard (part of Saruman’s personal stock, despite his sneers at Gandalf for letting the weed of the halflings cloud his judgment.) One thing we can be reasonably sure of is that pipeweed, belonging as it does to the genus nicotiana, is addictive. Certainly Gimli becomes much less grumpy when Merry and Pippin provide him with some leaf and a pipe to go along with it.

  Preparing Pipeweed

  Pipeweed, after harvesting, should be dried by laying the leaves out in the sun. These are then crumbled and stored in leather pouches for smoking. The quality of pipeweed can be discerned by touch as well as smell. Connoisseurs are even able to make a reasonable guess from touch and smell as to the year of the harvest.

  Pipes

  The best pipes are baked clay or wood. Wooden pipes, after carving, must be tempered and cured. In general, the longer you smoke a pipe, the better the flavor it will produce, as the layers of pipe smoke are infused into the wood or clay. Clay pipes are considered best by some, but they’re easily broken. If you plan to do a lot of traveling that consists of crawling around dark tunnels or climbing fir trees to escape goblins and wolves, a wooden pipe is probably a better choice.

  Smoke Rings

  Hobbits and wizards (or, at least, one wizard) love to blow smoke rings. In fact, Meriadoc refers to smoking as an “art,” and one imagines that Gandalf would agree. The wizard not only blows magical smoke rings in Bilbo’s house during the Unexpected Party, he spends valuable time in Beorn’s hall blowing smoke rings and sending them chasing one another, dodging around pillars and so on, while Bilbo and the dwarves are stamping with impatience for some news about the intentions of their host. Bilbo has some skill at smoke rings, though there’s no sign he passed this ability on to his nephew.

  If you want to impress a wizard, try blowing a few smoke rings. At the very least, it’ll distract him long enough for you to think up a better strategy.

  Hobbit Society and Culture

  In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

  —From JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit

  For hobbits, life in the Shire is a good life. To work hard, play hard, dine regularly, and enjoy the company of neighbors; these are values that are held in high esteem in hobbit culture. At the center of the hobbit way of life is a strict code of etiquette that should be followed at all times. A hobbit should be respectable, polite, and courteous, generous and helpful, and should shy away from trouble, in as such, but in a way that is respectable, polite, courteous, generous, and helpful.

  In today’s world, humans are too busy to be considerate of each other. They rush around, occupied with everything but accomplishing little. They make little time for family and friends, ignore their neighbors, and eat meals quickly (sometimes without even bothering to sit down). This sort of behavior can only serve to make one more and more ill at ease, impatient, and unhappy.

  Hobbits, on the other hand, base their lives on all of the important aspects of community and fellowship. The secret to their happiness lies in their day-to-day focus on relationships with one another and their morals and ethics. It shows in the way they manage their homes, tend their gardens, tackle a day’s work, and conduct themselves.

  We could all stand to learn a few things from hobbits and their way of life—a way of life that puts family, friends, and neighbors first. The hobbit way of life is one of good manners and consideration of one’s fellow man … or halfling.

  Dwellings

  One should keep one’s home tidy and well managed. After all, you never know when someone may stop by for a visit. A well-stocked larder and wine cellar are of the utmost importance for any hobbit of station.

  Even when Bilbo Baggins found himself, to his great surprise, entertaining thirteen dwarves because the wizard Gandalf decided to coerce him into joining their expedition, Bilbo was prepared (for the impromptu dinner party, if not for the adventure itself). Bilbo’s neat little hobbit hole was stocked with plenty of seed-cakes, mince-pies, cold chicken, pickles, apple tarts, and beer. In fact, he entertained the dwarves so well that they thought he’d be much more suited as a grocer than a member of their expedition. Bilbo was able to fulfill even the most random refreshment request from the dwarves, so well stocked was his pantry.

  Food is obviously important, but one should also always be prepared to make guests feel at home in other ways. You should keep your home tidy and comfortable, and have a plan for guests who may want or need to stay overnight.

  A clean and comfortable home, as well as the ability to entertain guests, is a sign of good character. It shows thoughtfulness and consideration. Being a well-prepared host is a duty that everyone should take seriously—hobbits and humans alike.

  Comfort and Cleanliness


  The home is a reflection of one’s character—in fact of one’s family’s character. It is advisable to keep it neat both inside and out. Your neighbors see your home every day in their comings and goings. If you don’t take care to keep your home in good repair and your garden well managed, neighbors may begin to doubt your good character. And just imagine the first impression such untidiness might make on a stranger. They might think you’re an unruly sort and wrangle you into a nefarious adventure right then and there. Best to keep things tidy and avoid trouble.

  The inside of your home requires attention as well. You never know when someone might stop by for a visit. The inside of a hobbit hole is usually clean, tidy, and practical. Plenty of good space exists for storing food, and there are lots of pegs for hanging cloaks and hoods. Any guest would feel most welcome, if a little cozy (hobbits are small, after all).

  When considering your own home, comfort is key. Your abode should be warm and inviting. There’s no need to be extravagant—just aspire to keep your surroundings neat and comfortable. Try a few throws and plenty of pillows on the couches and chairs. You’ll be living it up hobbit style in no time.