I vaguely remember seeing a comment somewhere ages ago (can't locate it) about hobbits being kind of the "fairies" of Middle-earth. They're quiet and sneaky and you don't know when they're around. In Gondor, they're only vaguely remembered as a possibly-legendary story. When Frodo gets speared by the cave troll and is not dead, the non-hobbits are all "omg what how is this possible?!?" instead of immediately assuming, "ah, he must have borrowed Bilbo's mithril mail." Like even if they're semi-joking that he must be really tough, they aren't 100% sure and wonder if maybe hobbits really are just that tough. Harfoots as fairies fits right in with that!
The Harfoots pretty much have to have suffered more recent calamities. It would be almost impossible to maintain the kind of culture-wide secrecy protocols they do for a thousand years if there weren't frequent, severe threats that convinced them to keep hiding. If nothing bad happened, they'd relax and cheerfully trade with their neighbors (even if they also thought the neighbors were a bunch of weirdos), as later the hobbits in the Shire are homebodies who don't trust outsiders but still visit Bree sometimes and get dwarves and elves and Gandalf wandering through regularly. That book wouldn't survive a thousand years on the road. After a thousand years of nomadism (even the scheduled kind), they probably would have ditched iron kettles. And the cloth they're wearing looks like it could only have been woven on large looms of the kind they don't have, and it isn't even very patched or worn, so they must have gotten big bolts of cloth woven by someone else fairly recently. (Maybe someone left clothing as gifts for the fairies but not shoes? Maybe someone burgled a Big Folk settlement and they're all pretending they just "found" it?) In so many ways, they're acting as you'd expect for a group still traumatized from recent catastrophes: they're clinging to material culture of a slightly different lifestyle which they were forced to abandon (maybe they used to stick around long enough to dig those holes in sandy banks for a season or two, hence kettles and looms and books), have some counter-productive rules about labor division which haven't been around long enough for the consequences to force them to change, and they're literally hiding in fear. All the time. So why shouldn't we think this is something we're supposed to realize? "This doesn't add up...unless...oh, got it!"
One interesting detail I was thinking about: the name Brandyfoot. Iirc, from what Tolkien tells us of the etymology of Brandybuck (Brandagamba) and Brandywine (Branda-nin), "branda" means roughly "border" or "march." It sounds similar to "bralda," which we see in the Brandywine's nickname "Bralda-him," or "heady ale." So Brandyfoot (or an older form of which this is the "modern translation") would be something like "border-foot," i.e., someone who stands or walks on the border. The explorers and boundary-pushers, basically. And they probably get nicknamed Bralda-fot as a way of saying "weirdos who charge recklessly into the unknown like they're drunk or something." Very fitting given how the Harfoots see Nori and her family!
And if you were making up a surname for proto-hobbits using bits of "modern" hobbit names, you wouldn't pick something like "Brandyfoot," because you'd go, "No, that sounds dumb, let's try a different mash-up." You'd only pick that if you went through that whole etymological rabbit-hole. Someone put thought into it!
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Date: 2023-07-28 02:47 am (UTC)The Harfoots pretty much have to have suffered more recent calamities. It would be almost impossible to maintain the kind of culture-wide secrecy protocols they do for a thousand years if there weren't frequent, severe threats that convinced them to keep hiding. If nothing bad happened, they'd relax and cheerfully trade with their neighbors (even if they also thought the neighbors were a bunch of weirdos), as later the hobbits in the Shire are homebodies who don't trust outsiders but still visit Bree sometimes and get dwarves and elves and Gandalf wandering through regularly. That book wouldn't survive a thousand years on the road. After a thousand years of nomadism (even the scheduled kind), they probably would have ditched iron kettles. And the cloth they're wearing looks like it could only have been woven on large looms of the kind they don't have, and it isn't even very patched or worn, so they must have gotten big bolts of cloth woven by someone else fairly recently. (Maybe someone left clothing as gifts for the fairies but not shoes? Maybe someone burgled a Big Folk settlement and they're all pretending they just "found" it?) In so many ways, they're acting as you'd expect for a group still traumatized from recent catastrophes: they're clinging to material culture of a slightly different lifestyle which they were forced to abandon (maybe they used to stick around long enough to dig those holes in sandy banks for a season or two, hence kettles and looms and books), have some counter-productive rules about labor division which haven't been around long enough for the consequences to force them to change, and they're literally hiding in fear. All the time. So why shouldn't we think this is something we're supposed to realize? "This doesn't add up...unless...oh, got it!"
One interesting detail I was thinking about: the name Brandyfoot. Iirc, from what Tolkien tells us of the etymology of Brandybuck (Brandagamba) and Brandywine (Branda-nin), "branda" means roughly "border" or "march." It sounds similar to "bralda," which we see in the Brandywine's nickname "Bralda-him," or "heady ale." So Brandyfoot (or an older form of which this is the "modern translation") would be something like "border-foot," i.e., someone who stands or walks on the border. The explorers and boundary-pushers, basically. And they probably get nicknamed Bralda-fot as a way of saying "weirdos who charge recklessly into the unknown like they're drunk or something." Very fitting given how the Harfoots see Nori and her family!
And if you were making up a surname for proto-hobbits using bits of "modern" hobbit names, you wouldn't pick something like "Brandyfoot," because you'd go, "No, that sounds dumb, let's try a different mash-up." You'd only pick that if you went through that whole etymological rabbit-hole. Someone put thought into it!