Listen. I know this is something of a silly conjecture, but there seems to be something about it which keeps the silliness going year after year. I'm only writing about this myself because the controversy seems to be resurging right now and I, being a philosophy major with few marketable skills, tend to go on and on about things which make little sense to most.
The fact of the matter is that a Basset Hound is not a Hobbit (the silly idea) any more that is Charles Shultz' Snoopy is not a Beagle Hound (definitely a Basset in the drawings). But the world will not be set right on either of these two ideas in this simple BLOG post. But, simply because we have little else to do with our time, let's review the evidense for the argument.
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a real epic tale when he penned The Hobbit. In such a small book he wove a web as compelling as the spider webs Bilbo found in the Dark Woods. Early on he spent a bit of time describing the Hobbit as being between two and four feet tall (long if thought about in Basset terms) with the average height being three feet six inches. Tolkien tells us the they are usually shy, but are never the less capable of great courage and amazing feats under the proper circumstances. He also describes Hobbits of having feet covered with hair with leathery soles. Tolkien paints for us a picture of a being not quite as stocky as similarly sized dwarves, fattish in the stomach, short-ish in the leg, and a jovial face.
While nobody can say with any certainty that Tolkien was taking the styling ques of a Hobbit from observations of Basset Hounds, the case is, at least, somewhat compelling.
Boiled down a bit we have a being which is:
- About three feet six inches,
- Shy, but not timid,
- Having furry feet with leathery soles,
- Stocky but not as much as others of the dwarf type,
- Fattish in the middle,
- Short-ish in the leg,
- And happy in the face.
The Hobbit of the Ring Series, and others, is pictured in a way which is at least sharing the description of a Human form of Basset Hound. This is the nature of the argument and I assume why the whole controversy isn't simply ignored. But the similarity is striking and, if Tolkien has chosen to set the series in a world populated by Dogs and Cats then Hobbits might have been portrayed as Basset Hounds or, perhaps more likely, the Welsh Corgi. Of course I prefer that it would have been as Basset Hounds, but Corgis are nice.
