Opinion Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power has one big failure: It doesn’t understand hobbits

Instead, where their hearts truly lie is in the greenery of nature, the scent of well-tilled earth, nice hot food on the table with a mug of ale to be shared with friends, smoking pipe weed, the comforts of a good hearth and above all, peace and quiet. That in itself is a special trait, reflecting a very unique kind of wisdom, something that attracts Gandalf, a being of incredible power and wisdom, towards them.

Even though we’d love to be born great warriors like Aragorn, Boromir, Faramir, Gimli, Legolas, or possess the amazing powers of Gandalf, Saruman or Sauron, in reality, there is nothing better and more special than the unpresuming and unexciting life of a hobbit. But what makes hobbits so special given that their lives are what we’d call unexciting and boring?

In The Lord Of The Rings, Tolkien portrayed hobbits as a very central piece of the lore with their resistance to the corrupting influence of the One Ring being the key to destroying it. With that said, Rings of Power takes place in the Second Age, thousands of years before LOTR, and as such, there is very little reason to even have Harfoots there and even more so, make them central characters in the TV show.

For Tolkien, the Shire was paradise far away from the smoke and dust of industrial societies, but in Rings of Power, Harfoots not only look disgusting, constantly covered in dirt unlike the portrayal of hobbits in the Peter Jackson trilogy where they are very civilized and clean people; they seem a most savage race having no care for their weaker brethren.

Harfoots are not nomadic people but rather skilled craftsmen who used to build permanent settlements and villages along their routes of travel. Tolkien described hobbit settlements in the following words: “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 .”

Perhaps, in an effort to subvert expectations, it would seem that in their minds the writers of the Rings of Power wrote “Living in filth on the ground, there lived harfoots. Not clean and civilised, but surrounded in dirt living with worms amidst an oozy smell. These are not your typical hobbits where there is food and comfort, these are harfoots and that means, dirt, filth and savagery in leaving all your weaker kin behind to die.”

As Bilbo Baggins put it, hobbits are neither counted as among the wisest of races, nor the mightiest of them and yet this simplicity and lack of ambition or desire are also what essentially makes hobbits immensely resilient to the corruption and evil of the One Ring, whether it is Bilbo, Frodo or Sam. When even the most powerful beings of Middle Earth cannot turn their gaze away from it, the hobbits have almost no interest in an object of such incredible power. In some ways, it can perhaps be argued that hobbits are the most powerful creatures of Middle Earth, for they possess a strength of character that is incredibly rare to find.

The One Ring was created as a means of wielding power over all the free peoples of Middle Earth. Sauron intended to give magic rings to the three major races (humans, elves, and dwarves) and use his One Ring to subject the rulers of those races to his power forever. That is why hobbits are the ideal ringbearers for they are neither ambitious nor a power-hungry race. They are content with a simple and quiet life in the Shire with their gardens, books and pipeweed.

Given this context, the portrayal of Harfoots in Rings of Power is demeaning to the very idea of hobbits. Not only are they unlikeable, they literally have no reason to be in it in the first place apart from padding the runtime. To make matters worse, they do nothing but detract from the other plotlines in the show.

A hobbit essentially embodies the struggles of the ordinary person, and the few acts of kindness and love that keep the darkness from enveloping the world. As Thorin Oakenshield told Bilbo Baggins, “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

Anand Venkitachalam writes on music and popular culture