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SME118: September 22 is Hobbit Day — the shared birthday of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, and the day this episode releases. So Jeff Haecker and the panel put the plot down and spend an hour on hobbits themselves.

Tolkien gave the Elves a book of genealogy and the Dwarves a chapter of creation. Hobbits got a footnote. In Letter 131 he says only that they are “a branch of the specifically human race,” entirely without non-human powers but “abnormally, for humans, free from ambition or greed of wealth” — and then declines to say how they got here. Ask him where they came from and the answer is from Men. Ask him how, and the answer is don’t worry about it.

The panel’s reading is that the vagueness is the point. Rob Story makes the case that Ilúvatar set the hobbits aside the way a people gets set apart — kept quiet, kept small, kept on the borders of genuinely dangerous country until the hour they were needed. Fr. Bryan Shackett takes it further: a life with no appetite for the things big people want is exactly the life the Ring cannot get a grip on.

From there, the three kindreds of hobbits explained — Harfoots, Stoors and Fallohides, distinguished in the Prologue by build, colouring and habit, each friendliest with a different people, and each leaving its mark on the great Shire families. Anyone who met the word “Harfoot” through The Rings of Power will find the whole thing sitting in Tolkien’s own front matter.

Then the question nobody asks. How does the Shire actually work? Tolkien will tell you how pipe-weed was invented but never how Frodo buys groceries. Rob Leonardi and Rob Story work through barter, silver pennies, the Brandybucks as old money — and whether pinning down the exchange rate would quietly destroy the place.

The conversation turns to Gollum, and to whether Sméagol was broken before the Ring found him or by it. Then to Shire Reckoning explained: twelve months of exactly thirty days, the two days of Yule at the year’s hinge, Lithe and the Overlithe at midsummer, and a mid-year’s day that belongs to no day of the week at all — the Shire-reform that froze the calendar in place so no hobbit ever had to check which Tuesday it was.

Patrick Mason closes on the Shire as Tolkien’s earthly paradise, scrawled into life on a blank leaf while he marked exam papers, and built to English specifications — with the honesty to let it be scoured the moment the men guarding it march away.

Also: the Rings of Power season 3 news that Durin and Disa’s children, Gerda and Gamli, will appear at last; a round table on throwing an eleventy-first birthday party; and everyone’s favorite hobbit.

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