Oh, I really like the connection you made about people maybe seeing Harfoots as like our fairies and possibly leaving gifts to propitiate them. I can totally see that, given the hunters' dialogue.
I'm not sure why I'm surprised that people expect Harfoots to be nearly identical to their hobbit descendants 3,000 years later. Even leaving aside details like "settled in the Shire vs. wandering like Tolkien said their ancestors did," that's a bit like asking whether it's realistic that 19th-century Italians were so culturally different from early Iron Age Latins. Even if you allow for slightly longer lifespans and more isolation to slow changes, that might shift the comparison to what, the Roman kingdom under the Tarquins to 18th-century Italy? It would be strange if we didn't see significant differences!
The differences also aren't so extreme as the dialogue alone would have us believe. When they list the people who "left the trail" at that memorial ceremony, not one of them died because they were deliberately left behind. We hear about wolves, rockslides, and bees--things they couldn't have stopped. And they don't laugh at the "eejit" who died from bee stings because they think it was genuinely hilarious; they're clearly trying to remember his failings fondly because it hurts to remember that he died in such a stupid way. I think most of the talk about leaving people behind is exactly that: talk. It's the "or else" threat to keep people in line, but no one expects it to be carried out under normal circumstances. Look how shocked Sadoc is when Malva suggests actually taking a family's wheels! Even she doesn't do more than suggest it. She doesn't grab the wheels or even press anyone to make a decision. And this is in a situation they might see as legitimately a matter of the group's survival, because the "big guy" Nori brought down upon them does bring genuine risk. And you're right about how mean hobbits can be, especially when they're saying nasty things about neighbors who don't conform well enough.
It does bother me that Poppy pulls her cart all by herself, because it seems counter-productive for the entire group. It looks like the Brandyfoot family has more or less adopted her; why can't she share their cart, maybe made slightly bigger to accommodate an extra person? Another person in the rotation to pull their cart would be good for them too. Or a variety of other possible solutions.
I'm wondering if, in addition to the initial catastrophe that set their ancestors wandering a thousand years ago, there was a more recent catastrophe. Maybe they had slightly more contact with outsiders and did trade for metal and cloth and such--until whatever it was happened. Then they withdrew into a much stricter isolation because it seemed like the right call at the time. They've been mending the few remaining artifacts ever since, plus maybe supplementing with those hypothetical gifts to the fair folk (and other one-off sources). The catastrophe was probably relatively recent. Their group has members with several distinct phenotypes, like several far-flung groups might have banded together not more than a generation or two ago. I'd say definitely within Sadoc's lifetime. In fact, the way Largo talks about his grief after his first wife Rose died and then seeing Marigold rise out of the grass, I wonder if Sadoc's group only merged with Largo's group when Dilly was a baby. (They might have occasionally met up before, but didn't merge until then.) If this is right, some of the oddities, like having more metal than you'd expect instead of cooking with hot rocks in baskets, carting around a settled-people-style book, and (talking about) leaving behind the weak, are not part of the thousand-year tradition, but artifacts of their extreme, panicky reactions to the more recent catastrophe.
Part of the issue here is that we've only seen one-fifth of the story. This early on, you expect there to be some things that don't add up--because they're supposed to be things the characters ought to question and eventually discover the true answers to. Or failing that, there will be enough clues for viewers to understand what the characters don't. If we could binge them all at once, a lot of questions might be answered. They might not, of course (the Harry Potter series being a prime example here), but we can't say for sure until we get there.
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Date: 2023-07-26 03:08 am (UTC)I'm not sure why I'm surprised that people expect Harfoots to be nearly identical to their hobbit descendants 3,000 years later. Even leaving aside details like "settled in the Shire vs. wandering like Tolkien said their ancestors did," that's a bit like asking whether it's realistic that 19th-century Italians were so culturally different from early Iron Age Latins. Even if you allow for slightly longer lifespans and more isolation to slow changes, that might shift the comparison to what, the Roman kingdom under the Tarquins to 18th-century Italy? It would be strange if we didn't see significant differences!
The differences also aren't so extreme as the dialogue alone would have us believe. When they list the people who "left the trail" at that memorial ceremony, not one of them died because they were deliberately left behind. We hear about wolves, rockslides, and bees--things they couldn't have stopped. And they don't laugh at the "eejit" who died from bee stings because they think it was genuinely hilarious; they're clearly trying to remember his failings fondly because it hurts to remember that he died in such a stupid way. I think most of the talk about leaving people behind is exactly that: talk. It's the "or else" threat to keep people in line, but no one expects it to be carried out under normal circumstances. Look how shocked Sadoc is when Malva suggests actually taking a family's wheels! Even she doesn't do more than suggest it. She doesn't grab the wheels or even press anyone to make a decision. And this is in a situation they might see as legitimately a matter of the group's survival, because the "big guy" Nori brought down upon them does bring genuine risk. And you're right about how mean hobbits can be, especially when they're saying nasty things about neighbors who don't conform well enough.
It does bother me that Poppy pulls her cart all by herself, because it seems counter-productive for the entire group. It looks like the Brandyfoot family has more or less adopted her; why can't she share their cart, maybe made slightly bigger to accommodate an extra person? Another person in the rotation to pull their cart would be good for them too. Or a variety of other possible solutions.
I'm wondering if, in addition to the initial catastrophe that set their ancestors wandering a thousand years ago, there was a more recent catastrophe. Maybe they had slightly more contact with outsiders and did trade for metal and cloth and such--until whatever it was happened. Then they withdrew into a much stricter isolation because it seemed like the right call at the time. They've been mending the few remaining artifacts ever since, plus maybe supplementing with those hypothetical gifts to the fair folk (and other one-off sources). The catastrophe was probably relatively recent. Their group has members with several distinct phenotypes, like several far-flung groups might have banded together not more than a generation or two ago. I'd say definitely within Sadoc's lifetime. In fact, the way Largo talks about his grief after his first wife Rose died and then seeing Marigold rise out of the grass, I wonder if Sadoc's group only merged with Largo's group when Dilly was a baby. (They might have occasionally met up before, but didn't merge until then.) If this is right, some of the oddities, like having more metal than you'd expect instead of cooking with hot rocks in baskets, carting around a settled-people-style book, and (talking about) leaving behind the weak, are not part of the thousand-year tradition, but artifacts of their extreme, panicky reactions to the more recent catastrophe.
Part of the issue here is that we've only seen one-fifth of the story. This early on, you expect there to be some things that don't add up--because they're supposed to be things the characters ought to question and eventually discover the true answers to. Or failing that, there will be enough clues for viewers to understand what the characters don't. If we could binge them all at once, a lot of questions might be answered. They might not, of course (the Harry Potter series being a prime example here), but we can't say for sure until we get there.