Biology of the Hobbit

mouth tight and snap, that's right. Let's have no more argument. I have chosen mister Baggins, and that ought to be enough for all of you. If I say he is a burglar, a burglar he is, or will be when the time comes. There's a lot more to him than you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea of himself. You may possibly all live to thank me. Yet, welcome to stuff to blow your mind? The production of My Heart Radio. Hey, are you welcome to stuff to

blow your mind? My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick, and I guess it's obvious that we're back in Hobbit territory today. That's right. You know, we did an episode, I guess a few months back or several months back, I'm not sure which, where we talked about the One Ring, we contemplated the metallurgy of the Rings of Power and the Lord of the Rings. And in this episode, we're going to be returning to Middle Earth. We're going to look at everyone's favorite hole dwelling pipe

smoking six meal a day, eating humanoids, the Hobbit. So this year I was going back and reading Lord of the Rings, and I was about halfway through Fellowship of the Ring, and the question entered my mind. And that question is are the Hobbits too cute? Are their lives just too quaint and too sweet for this story? And

I thought about it for a minute. I was like, you know, I get a little bit board maybe in some of the early chapters of Fellowship where it's going on and on about the the quaintness of the Hobbit existence. But then I realized, no, I think it really does work. It. Uh. It's important for the story because it makes you feel the adventure and the pain of the adventure all the more. When you get a full feeling for how cozy and

unadventurous their their prequest lives were. Yeah, it's in a fantastic world that just gets more and more fantastic and dark and magical the further out you go from the Shire, the realm of the Middle Earth that is home to the Hobbits, you know, And it makes sense to start with something that is quaint, that is normal, that is almost you know, painfully British and cozy and uh uh, not so much cute, I guess, at least not in

the original intent. I know, I know, I've read that Tolkien did not like the idea of illustrations that made the Hobbits look too much like children, because they should all look like like small little like middle aged or old men imagine. But yeah, you need you need somebody ordinary to go on these adventures, to be challenged by these adventures. Right, you feel the rain and the hardness of the stones under their feet and the threat of the Goblin's blade so much more when you've when you've

seen the world of Tea by the Fire. Yeah, and then and there's certainly the the species of Middle Earth that we can relate to the most. They are, they're really they're even more human than the humans or the men as Token calls them, uh, that we encounter in the story. Essentially the main storytelling reason that the Hobbits are central to the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. But of course there's more to this as well, more

to unwrap. And and that's why we chose that particular passage from the Hobbit to read at the beginning, because in this particular section, basically Gandalf, the gray globetrotting wizard that he is, is injecting himself into dwarf and politics essentially to rid the world of the last evil dragon

so that it can't aid the coming war with Saaron. Uh. You know, it's uh, you know, it's it's in a way, it's kind of like shady politics, I guess, but it's it's certainly yeah, but it's it's it serves a greater good. And and but Gandalf is getting a bit frustrated because he's he's helping the dwarves out, he's enabling this mission, uh to to retake their mountain from smog. And they don't want to have thirteen dwarves go on a trip that's unlucky. They need another person, and Gandalf says, here

you go, Here is a Hobbit, here's Bilbo. He's the fellow you need. He's a burglar. You're gonna need a burglar. And of course the whole time Bilbo is like, I can't go on adventure. I can't do that. I don't have any of these skills. And the dwarves are agreeing with him, and they're saying, oh, he's useless, let's not take him. Don't you have something else. Let's just eat all his food and move on, right, So you know

it's you. It's it's easy to to understand the criticism because Bilbo does seem rather useless, and he remains rather useless feeling for a large portion of the book. Uh So it raises the question is there something about the Hobbit? Is there something about this species that that that is really special? Is there Hobbit exceptionalism that might be exploited?

And that is ultimately what Gandalf is leaning on, that there's something special about the Hobbits that will help enable, you know, first of all, victory and this mission to retake the Lonely Mountain, and then ultimately in the quest of the Ring that we encounter in the Lord of the Rings. You know, despite how over the course of The Lord of the Rings we see several different Hobbits in different ways, at different times, being seduced by the power of the Ring, it does seem like Hobbits, more

than other creatures, are somewhat resistant to it. Like they are somehow able to put up more of a fight, to be less enticed by the promises of power and glory that the Ring entails. Yeah, perhaps leaning into their inherent quaintness, right, I mean, ultimately, all any hobbit wants is a nice hobbit hole to live in and a mug of ale and you know, some some mush rooms and eggs and bacon for for one of their many meals.

I mean, almost any time a man, a human gets his hands on the ring, he's like, oh great, yes, so we'll slow down for a second here, because there may be some people out there. I find it hard to believe, but there may be some people who don't know what a hobbit is. Well, just to drive it home here, the Lord of the Rings the Hobbit. These books are our fantasy novels full of elves, and goblins, dragons, uh you know, demonic ball rogs, uh, half living ring races,

and various demigods and wizards. But then we also have the quaint hobbits, and typically they fit the following profile. They are quote a little people about half our height. They walk around barefooted and boast a generous helping of hair atop each foot. I was to understand they had hair underneath their feet. Is that not right? I think you're right as well. We just that the illustrations rarely

show that that the bottom of the foot hair. I think that was my understanding is that they're they're very um. They're actually good as burglars because they're very light of step and their footfalls are quiet cushioned by this hair. They're also known for their hobbit holes. These are fashionable underground homes, but they don't always reside in these, despite their their overall subterranean tendencies and a likely history of borrow habitation and uh oh. A big one, of course,

is their hunger. They're their appetite. They require some six meals a day or what about second breakfast, and then they're also at least very good at hiding, which can be extrapolated into a skill of burglary. And I guess that's that's one argument for what Gandolf is saying, Like, here is a species it's naturally good at hiding. So given time, by the time you get to the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo will either be dead or very good at adventuring and the like in a stealthy way, he will have

leveled up appropriately. But another another way to look at it is to look at the specific biological adaptations of a hypothetical hobbit species. And so that's what we're gonna largely focus on in this episode. And the beautiful thing is that we don't have to just make all of this up on our own. They're a handful of papers that we've been able to refer to, generally of the

tongue in cheek variety. So we're not talking like hard, serious scientific or medical contemplation, but still do get quantitative about it. And then you get quantitative and they get into the science of like, all right, let's talk about hobbits. Let's talk about how much they eat? Would they be healthy? Would they be actually capable of walking across the continent with a bunch of adventurers. Uh, you know what, are they truly this this solid investment that Gandalf the Gray seas.

That's a mighty good question. I mean, not to cast any doubt on Gandalf the Gray's um in a mindset here. You know, clearly great wizard. We'd love to have him on the show sometime for an interview. But uh, to tune into our new podcast series, Gandalf Mindset. It's where you learn wizard mindset. Mindset. There's probably way a book about that. Don't let them steal your staff. Six easy steps to Wizard dominance. I would not be surprised if if to find out that a book like that existed.

All right, well, let's start with the with the obvious, the dietary constraints of the Hobbit. Now, this is going to be one of the main differences you would notice in like a physical energy kind of situation with the Hobbits, because they never stop eating. That's one of the things that has driven home again and again in the books.

It's always time for a meal. Yeah yeah, and they Plus they tend to be a little bit portly, leading many a non halfling to question their sedendary lifestyle and and and and, as well as their insistence on those six daily meals because they go with breakfast, second breakfast, eleven seas, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper. How is

dinner different from supper? Yeah? That that one was the hardest for me to figure out, because I was like, all right, let me look at my own, you know, dietary requirements in my schedule, and and I realized, Okay, I usually like breakfast for me is like smoothie and coffee, and then second breakfast is like more coffee and like an apple or something later on, and then eleven z s. I'm I have been known to have like a half a peanut butter sandwich, perhaps with more coffee, and then

I have actual lunch, and then I don't have afternoon tea, but I generally have more coffee and perhaps another apple, and then dinner I have an evening meal, But supper I can't. I can't really come up with a uh, you know, a possibility for that in my life, like unless you count an after dinner drink or a you know, a late night snack as a meal. And I don't

think we were talking about that with Hobbits. I think for each of these, with the possible exception of the afternoon tea, we're talking about a full blown meal or you're closer to Hobbit scheduling than a lot of people. Though it sounds like it sounds like you kind of graze. Yeah, I mean, especially if I'm working from home and it's cold out, then it's just you know, wandering around trying to figure out what I can smear peanut butter on um. That's why it's good to get out of the house.

But yeah, it's it's hard to figure out how that what the difference between uh supper and dinner would be for the for the Hobbit, And clearly it points towards just the fact that they need more to eat. They have just higher dietary requirements than a mere human or some other species. So here's the question, based on real world biology, is this sort of diet reasonable for a

creature of the hobbit stature? And unfortunately we have a paper to refer to in Christio Meno, Horan and sky Rosetti of the University of Leicester Center for Interdisciplinary Science weighed in on the issue in their paper Modeling the BMR of Species in Middle Earth. So the BMR in question, this is the base metabolic rate. This is the number of calories that our bodies are very cells need in

order to function well. And the base part of it would be this is not including whatever extra stuff you're doing. This is just like to stay alive. Yeah, this is not just like extra curricular eating, the wandering around the house looking for peanut butter sort of thing. So ather of words, the researchers set out to gauge the amount of energy that a Hobbit's body needs to function at rest, and they did this not only for the Hobbits of

Middle Earth, but also for the fair elves. They did this by modeling each fictional race as an actual Mammalian Earth species. The European road deer stood in for forest dwelling elves, and the Hobbit, being a burrowing hole dwelling people, was stuck with the Southwestern pygmy possum. And this is what they figured out. They decided that for a hobbit BMR, we're looking at one thousand, eight hundred and eighteen point

seven kilo calories every day. This compared to seventeen h two point to killer calories every six days for humans or or men in Middle Earth as they're called, and then for elves, we're looking at one thousand, four hundred, sixteen point five kilo calories. As such, they figured the average hobbit would require some six point seven meals per day, and uh, indeed that's in keeping with the high hiher

energy demands for smaller birds and mammals. Now, you might think, why would smaller animals on average have greater relative food requirements, right, Like, wouldn't it be bigger animals that would have greater relative food requirements. Well, on average, smaller animals do tend to have faster metabolisms. There's you know, individual variation, but on average, the smaller you are, probably the more energy you burn proportional to your body mass. Why would this be? One

major reason is thermoregulation. So a major part of what chemical energy from food does in metabolism is keep the body warm. Heat loss from an organism is a function of its surface area. So in the past we've talked about, you know, one reason for the biological implausibility of like Kaiju sized animals like King Kong is that they would probably have trouble cooling their bodies they're they're too big. They've got too much volume and not enough surface area

for heat to escape through. Even worse, if you happen to be a giant fire breathing dragon like small exactly uh, smaller animals that would have exactly the opposite problem. Right. Smaller animals have a greater surface area to volume ratio, meaning they lose heat faster than larger animals. Think of the way that a smaller ice cube melts faster than a bigger one. Uh. So they often have to eat a lot more relative to their body weight to maintain

a stable body temperature. Uh. Some very small animals have just unbelievable metabolic requirements and can eat huge amounts of food relative to their bodies. I was reading a Good nat Geo article about this by Liz Langley, and uh, it made an interesting point in comparison, so it brings up the biggest animal on the earth, the blue whale.

The blue whale on average eats about four tons of krill every day, and that is definitely a lot of food, or it sounds like a lot, But the blue whale has a body mass of around two hundred tons, so on average the whale is only eating about two percent worth of its body weight every twenty four hours. Meanwhile, the pigmy shrew of Britain, which only weighs about an ounce, can eat about a hundred and twenty five percent of

its body weight per day. So think about this, It's like a one hundred and sixty pound human eight a hundred and twenty five percent of their body weight every day. This would be about two hundred pounds worth of food. I did some math and if it was all Big Max, that's about three hundred and seventy six Big Max a day. Wow, just spread out before you. That's that's something they divided into six meals. The shrew factoid reminds me of I imagine you've seen this because it was on MSTY three

K back in the day. They did Attack of the Killer Shrews. Terrible black and white movie. But I think it was like dogs with carpet draped over them. Yeah, but fun in a way because I think they tried so. Basically, the situation was, hey, shrews are these ravenous creek tres, but thankfully they're small. If they ever got big, they would be the most dangerous predator on the planet. And then love and behold that's what happens in this movie. Oh,

that's a great premise, except it it didn't work. It doesn't work because if they got bigger, they wouldn't have the same surface to volume problem. Yeah but but yeah, that that reminded me of of that. I think they end up like building a tank out of like stuff in their cabin too, then survive the trees. It's it's a terrible movie, but way better than it should be.

One of the things I remember about it is the way that like the dogs that they've got dressed up to be the shrews really act like dogs, and you just see them kind of like trotting around at people like dogs do, and it's cute. They're supposed to be these menacing monsters, but like they're clearly happy to see

the people on set. And it's not just that like this one species, the pygmy shure of Britain, is is like, you know, freakish, Like even the common trew needs to eat every two to three hours and has to consume an average of like of its body weight ere days. This is fairly common among very small organisms. They need to eat a lot of food relative to their body size, and again that's just the base metabolic rate. That's not to mention other necessary expenditures for say, creatures that engage

in very energy intensive activities. One great example here is hummingbirds. So they're very small, they have big thermoregulation requirements, but they also have huge caloric requirements from physical activity. They've got to stay in the air. I mean, think about how much energy it takes to keep vehicles in the air. Uh So, they use these rapid wing beats that require their heart to beat about twelve hundred times a minute,

maybe like twenty beats per second. Sometimes that's that's a lot. Yeah, yeah, so they do. They are just constantly having to feed, and then if they can't, if you have it's like I imagine most if you have seen the various documentaries that show how the like. In some cases they'll just have to shut their bodies down. They have to go in a kind of suspended animation at times. But on an average day, a hummingbird will often have to eat

roughly twice its body weight and nectar. Uh So, I was trying to think would hobbits have any such requirements based on activity? You can see why having smaller bodies that have a higher surface area of volume ratio. Okay, but I can't really think of any activities that are along the lines of the hummingbirds. I'm not sure how much energy it takes to smoke pipeweed or to like eat tea cakes and gossip about other families. But maybe

there's something going on there. I wonder if blowing rings of pipe weed smoke might actually be a highly energy intensive activity. Well, some of them are farmers, you do remember farmer maggot. Okay, so that's a lot of work. A lot of work goes into that. And then there there are at least tales of of warring Hobbits in the past. Which one it was that is said to have actually ridden a horse and battle to Goblin and

in a pass skirmish. So there are exceptions, but for the most part, the typical hobbit life that when visions does entail a lot of sitting around and reflecting. I guess another option is, what if there's something going on in the hobbit brain that makes their their nervous system very energy intensive. Yeah, so maybe they're like secret ment ats like the hobbit. The fact that they can you know, remember so much gossip about the other families in the shire.

Or maybe it takes a huge amount of mental energy to constantly resist the call to adventure. Yeah, or they they do worry a lot, like what what if they're they're high energy cognitive powers are used exclusively to worrying about where their next meal is going to come from? And and uh and and how tiresome the journey is. Alright, we're gonna take a break, but when we come back, we're going to continue this discussion and we're gonna start

talking about some some elven bread. Than alright, we're back. So there's an interesting follow up to this article we were talking about with the base metabolic rate. Again, that was from the author's Chris Show amount of Horran and sky Rosetti. Well, they followed it up with another paper simply walking into more door. How much limbus would the Fellowship have needed? So Limbus, as you might remember, is the special travel bread of the elves that helps sustain

our adventurers. It's wrapped in leaves. It's brown on the outside and sweet and white on the inside, and it and it never spoils. It's just always perfect. And I don't know, maybe even a little bit warm. It's Galadriel that gives them the limbus, right, I think so, And yeah, it's it's supposed to be great stuff. I aways imagine it is being like a scone, you know, like a really good scone. Like they're just living exclusively off scones

on this journey. So it becomes one of the key provisions that they eat a lot on these on the journey and the Lord of the Rings, so naturally the authors wanted to know how much of this one would need to sustain all nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring on a ninety two day quest across the continent. Well, they concluded that a single Hobbit would require seventy six pieces of Elvin limbus bread to march all the way

to Mount Doom. That amount, that's seventy six pieces of limbus compared with ninety nine for a dwarf, sixty for an elf in seventy one for humans. As such, the nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring, they concluded, would require six hundred and seventy five pieces of limbus, with three hundred and four pieces allotted to the four Hobbit members. Uh Gimili alone would need ninety nine pieces of limbus. Well, now I know they didn't get that

much limbus. I think they would have said something. I remember they talked about how you know, you eat one bite of limbus in your full for you know a while. Yeah, that's the other thing it is. It is magic, and that that's the underlying footnote on all of these discussions. Right. Uh, it is ultimately magical bread and so forth. Therefore it has its own rules. But still it's it's this. It's a neat it's a neat consideration here. Now, of course

it's probably a little bit dry. I always imagine it being a little dry, So you're gonna need something to wash it all down with. You're gonna need some some water. And here, according to yet another paper, this time from Catherine Barrage, the conclusion is that they wouldn't have been able to carry all of their water with them on

the journey. She points out that there's no agreed upon method to calculate water requirements for adult humans, but surface area of the individual is typically invoked, and she concludes that one hobbit would have would have required two point four leaders per day. And when you extrapolate that to all the days of the journey, you're encountering an amount of water that would be impossible for a Hobbit to

carry for itself. Now you, aside from Sam mentioning some concern over water on their travels, I don't remember them really detailing a lot of their woes. Getting potable water is good because I guess surely there would have been some other ways to get drinking water on the way, like when they visited this place or another, Occasionally there's going to be a stream of of moving water that

they can trust. I don't recall them ever being concerned about like getting giardia from drinking water out of the stream or something. Yeah, it would have been a different book of all the Hobbits just constantly had dysenteria the whole way to Mortal Lord of the Diarrhea. Okay, so here's a Here's here's another fun wrinkle in all of this. Token rights meals didn't come quite as often as Bilbo would have liked them, but still he began to feel

that adventures were not so bad after all. So Bilbo continually complains about being hungry and tired, but he makes do, and he digs into a wide variety of foods during the journey. Uh. This is this is one of the pleasures of a lot of books, really, but especially in

the Hobbit. It's like all these foods that he encountered, they're not that diverse, but there, but every he eats a lot of interesting things, you know, like they meet up with a vegetarian wear bear and he serves them cream and honey, you know, yeah, yeah, or um you know, or there, or they're scavenging sorrel and berries in the mountain wilds and then making do with that, you know.

So he may have wanted bacon and eggs and mushrooms like any normal Hobbit, of of taste and means, but means of course, but he was able to get by on all of these various foods. So I think we can conclude from that possibly that you know, Hobbits, like other highly adaptive organisms, benefit from a varied omnivorous diet. So even though they require quite a few calories, they're

able to get them in a variety of ways. I'm reminded of the primal state to which we see the Hobbit Snegel reduced in Lord of the Rings sneegel like a gollum. You know, he's the sneaky, opportunistic creature that hunts that scavenge scavenges. He'll eat anything he can get his hands on, even though he prefers meat. Yeah, he'll well, he likes fish. He in the movies at least I don't recall the scene in the books, but he uh you know what's taters precious. He does not seem to

be a fan of the carbs. He could be what happens to a hobbit on the paleo diet. Yeah, of course, of course. One thing we have to remember about about Sneckel is that he's been living underground for a long time and he's basically evolved into this more subterranean form, and he's eating he has the sort of diet you would expect from like a mostly subterranean creature, Like he's having to eat just a bunch of fish, uh, you know, ioas fish whatever you can find, the occasional goblin that

he can murder in a passageway. But he does have that beach bod is very skinny relative to the other hobbits. It's true, he's in some ways, he's in better shape um, and of course he has this one fitness secret that drives people crazy. And then of course it's the One Ring, right, Yeah,

nutritionists hate him. Click here to find his one secret. Yeah, it's It's often overlooked the fitness advantages of the of the One Ring and the various rings of power, because the Nascal we're all in pretty good shape as well, you know, regardless of their they're possibly you know, incorporeal

form and unliving status and soulless nature. Now to speak more about the biological effects of the One Ring, that reminds me I was thinking about how the Hobbit fits into theories about basal metabolic rate versus lifespan, because we know the Ring does something to lifespan. Hobbits live a long time, Bilbo Baggins live to the old age of a hundred and thirty one, but that is apparently due to the unnatural life extending powers of the One Ring. Right,

That's one of the things the Ring supposedly does. It helps you live a long time or maybe even indefinitely. If you never lose it, though that your life becomes reduced to a hollow echo of what it once was. Right, And as we mentioned in the last episode about the Ring, the ring will lose you if it no longer needs you, So basically it just has the option of keeping its host alive for an extended period of time if it if it aids the ring right. But even without the Ring,

Hobbits seem to live for a long time. The ringless Hobbit old Took live to the ripe old age of a hundred and thirty, just one year less than Bilbo, without any kind of special magic that we know of. Apparently it's normal for Hobbits to live to about hundred uh if if the Hobbit were a real species on Earth, that would be towards the longest end of the lifespan spectrum. I think it said at some point in Lord of the Rings that Hobbits tend to come of age in

their thirties. So you might say that, I don't know what that that's like puberty or something for Hobbits. So so not just like actually get their life together in their theorties, it actually like go through puberty at that point. Well, I I don't know. I mean, he doesn't say puberty,

that's when they come of age. I assume that's what that means there's something like the tweens of the Hobbit world are in their twenties probably, But the long lifespan of Hobbits is another place where you might look at the Hobbit and say, Okay, this seems to conflict with stuff we know about Earth biology, because when you look at the animals on Earth, especially you look at the mammals, it can certainly seem like the longest lived animals tend to be large and the small ones tend to have

short lives. Like you know, mice and rats can live for just a couple of years, Whales can live for a very very long time. If you expand that to vertebrates more generally, you know, I think the longest lived vertebrate that I know of is the greenland shark, which can live hundreds of years. Four hundred years I think was an estimate on on one recently. Yeah, but it

tends to be a little bit larger. In the twentieth century, actually, there was a popular theory in biology that made this connection. It connected aging and lifespan to metabolism. Uh. It was known as the rate of living theory, and essentially it said that animals with a slower metabolism that burn energy more slowly will tend to live longer because expending energy

literally ages you. Uh, So animals with higher dietary requirements, faster heart rates, faster metabolism, etcetera, will have shorter lives under this hypothesis. There are even some humans who who seem to at least intuitively believe some version of this theory. Yes,

I've I have seen them quoted on this indeed. But but a side effect of this, of course would be the animals with smaller bodies, because they tend to have faster metabolisms like we were talking about earlier, will also on average have shorter lives, and so at a glance,

that does seem to line up with the animal world. Right. So, this theory, first proposed in the early nineteen twenties, is often associated primarily with early work done by an American biologist named Raymond Pearl, and it really did seem plausible for a while, but eventually it was undercut by evidence. So you had early studies of animal lifespans that sort of seemed to support it, but then later studies with more detailed data sets and better analysis didn't actually find

a broad correlation between metabolism and lifespan. For example, birds tend to have higher metabolisms than than mammals of about the same size, yet on average, the birds tend to live longer. So even though we can find a lot of examples of smaller animals that have short lives and larger animals that have long lives, it turns out the

correlation doesn't hold up. The better your analysis is, I was reading about another study that undercut the rate of living hypothesis by looking at metabolic manipulations within the same species. So the very short version is you have rats in two different conditions. One set of rats lives in a world of twenty two degrees celsius or seventy one degrees fahrenheit, the nice warm world, and then there's another group of rats that lives at ten degrees celsius or fifty degrees fahrenheit.

So obviously the group living in colder conditions has to burn more energy to maintain body temperature, so by rate of living logic, you would expect them to die younger, but they didn't. The study found that the the rodents and the two conditions lived the same average lifespan, so the rate of living hypothesis is no longer thought to be correct, and it represents no threat whatsoever to the

plausibility of Hobbits. Excellent. All right, On that note, we're going to take one more break and hopefully they'll be an ad for Limbus in here. We've been trying to get Limbus as a sponsor for a while, but we'll see how it goes. Anyway, one more break and then we'll be right back. Alright, we're back. You know what's great is dipping your limbus in a nice bowl of brown Yeah. I don't know. I always figured it was

it's just dessert, Like it's dessert all the time. Maybe they just well that I read it originally as a kid, so at the time, I'm like, yeah, it's like this, it's like short bread all day, every day. Ever been into short bread? I don't even like it as dessert. Uh, well, you know, you're not a Hobbit. They maybe they're more into it, or elves. Maybe the elves themselves have, you know, different tolerance for sweets. What's the Middle Earth species that

really likes like pickles? That's that's I think it's probably Hobbits. Again, I feel like Hobbits can be totally into pickles. I don't remember specifically if if there was ever mentioned of hobbit seating pickles, but I bet they like pickles. Dude,

you should try dwarf and century eggs, all right. So, if we're to entertain the idea that Hobbits as a species factor so heavily into the struggle for Middle Earth, based in part on their biology, it raises this question how suited are the various other species or or races as they're sometimes called, especially due to you know, this is another fantasy as well, Like in Dungeons and Dragons, you talk about the different races even though you're essentially

talking about different species. Um So, so you know, how do these other various species stack up in the struggle

for global dominance just based on their biology? And it's interesting to think about this because while Homo sapiens came into contact with the likes of the Neanderthals, Middle Earth is an entirely different situation because you have multiple species of similar cognitive and technological abilities coming into contact with each other, warring against each other, forming factions, and and granted some of the players involved, our magical beings others

are artificial creations, and others still or essentially demigods. But we're we're talking a world full of humans, elves, dwarfs, hobbits, goblins, orcs, trolls, giants, dragons, and then various animals with human level intelligence such as the eagles, just to name a few. The deciding factor, however, might just come down to sunlight, what which which? Isn't

that surprising, right, because sunlight is good, darkness bad. This is the basic dichotomy of of our of our fantasy and our myth make But but, but let's think back to the hobbits omnivorous diet and its subterranean tendencies, because I want to talk about briefly about a fun little paper that you can find in full in PDF form on online if you want to read it for yourself, by Dr Joseph A. Hopkinson and and his son Nicholas S.

Hopkinson uh and. This was published in the Medical Journal of Australia paper The hobbit An Unexpected Deficiency and uh And what they end up arguing is that their very diet, the very diet of the hobbit um, would be key to elevating their vitamin D levels. So vitamin D, as I think we've discussed on the show before, is crucial for skeletal health and the immune system, with deficiency symptoms

ranging from stuff like depression and weakness to increased bone fragility. Uh, none of those are things you want while adventuring on a great quest to save the world, right or to conquer it. Either way, you want to want to look at it. You don't want to be depressed and weak and possibly more susceptible to bone breaks. Now a note here, oily fish are a great place to get your vitamin D if you're not getting it from the sun. So

advantage to sniegel here. Oh that's right, he loves them wriggling. Yeah, but I don't know, do we see him eating oily fish? Is he getting start to I don't know how oily the subterranean fish of the Misty Mountains happened to be. But but maybe he's getting the occasional like ten of sardines from the goblins anyway. Uh, he loves a good

mahi mahi. So anyway, Bilbo's diverse diet and willingness to travel long distances in the sun, according to the Hopkinson's not only boost his vitamin D intake, but also makes the Hobbit species one of Middle Earth's top vitamin D consumers. So they assigned major Middle Earth species and individuals a vitamin D score between zero and four. Hobbits, men, and high elves they topped the list that they get fours across the board. Dwarves scored to three gallum score or

Sniegel scored a lowly one. And then the evil species of Middle Earth, the dragons, the goblins, and the trolls, and I'm assuming they're they're they're putting the works in with the goblins here since they're essentially the same species. All of them scored zeros. Right, because these are basically entirely indoor underground species right right, or they live in

in darkness and read I mean more door itself. Right is is often depicted and described as being like clothed, you know, shielded from the sun by the volcanic ashes of Mount Doom. Right, it is a realm of darkness. Yeah, I know Tolkien said that he did not write these books as allegory, but yeah, I wonder if where was he really just trying to get his kids to go outside. It's like you know, you live your whole life inside

you become a bad goblin like me. Well yeah, I mean it's I mean that critique has been applied to his work before. Right. The idea that like Mordor is industrialism and uh and modernity and and the shire is the you know, is that the rural countryside in traditional ways of England. Right, So anyway, moral attributes and marshall prowess are also going to play a factor, they argue. But they think that vitamin D consumption might be a

key predictor for victory in mid Earth and uh. And it's worth noting that Dr Hopkinson uh knew what he knows what he's talking about with vitamin D. He previously studied the effects of vitamin D and people with lung disease. As a result, he's not a fan of all the smoking that goes on, especially with the Hobbits and the wizarding folk like Gandalf. Uh that would not be be good for their overall health. But still no, wait a minute, I was reading. According to Sauron, uh, smoking has not

been definitively linked with any negative health effects. Oh yeah, yeah, if you can trust Sauron on that one, um so anyway, the lie? Why would he lie? It's a great deceiver, right, You're forgetting his prior forms. You're only thinking about the all seeing eye, and you think that just because he has an all seeing eye, he's privy to all truth. But he's still a liar. Worm Tongue said it too,

He said that this is anti pipeweed alarmism. Alright, So taking all of this into account, we can look at the Hobbit and we say the Hobbit ultimately offers us a high metabolism creature with a very diet able to march across Middle Earths varied ecosystems and eat whatever they can find within, you know, reason, in order to maintain their vitamin D levels and therefore contribute to the victory of good over evil in Middle Earth. I buy it now, Robert. I've got to ask what what got you looking for

Hobbit papers? I know somehow you must have set out on this journey. Well this, this happens a lot where something will enter my head and I'll think, well, let's see if their papers about the Lord of the Rings. Let's see if people are mentioning, you know, because sometimes it's you'll find examples where where authors of even very very serious uh scientific papers will just at least for fun reference, say a particular myth or a particular uh

you know, the line from Shakespeare. So sometimes you have like that level of treatment or it's a pun in the title of that's frequently used in the title of a scientific study. But but then you have these this level of study as well, which which I think is great. You know, again, very tongue in cheek. All of these

were written at least in part to entertain uh. And the vitamin D paper specific especially has like a fun little illustration in it as well, so it was very much I think it was part of like a Christmas uh special that they put out where they have a

lot of tongue in cheap papers. Uh. But it's it's also I think these are all fun because, especially for a show like ours, we might normally not really discuss vitamin D deficiency on the show at length, but this gives us a reason to get into it and and kind of an angle that makes it more interesting than it might otherwise be. And and it's of course it's a it's an important topic as well, right because it

comes down to human health. Like one of the one of the things that the Hopkinson's arguing in their paper is that, you know, ultimately, if we're to draw some sort of conclusion from all of this, it's that we all need to consider having a more very diet and uh getting out in the sun, um, you know, with proper protection of course, if concerning the rays of the sun, but you know, get your vitamin D, have a very diet and stay active and it's going to benefit you.

And also stay away from that those hobbit pipes and those wizarding pipes because it's no good for you. But this is just one This is just one angle on Middle Earth and science. I'm sure there are numerous other articles out there that that that go after a different angle of Tolkien's work and work some science on it. So maybe we'll be able to come back in a future episode and discuss some other corner of Middle Earth. I had the idea that we could do an episode

about inns. I'm not sure what we we'd figure it out. We have to play the episode at half speed. Unfortunately, we could totally do an episode on it's getting into the like the movements of plants and uh uh you know, trees that quote unquote walk uh. I mean there are examples that are that are pretty fascinating and and really when you start, when you essentially consider that that plants are are living at this different time frame than this

different rate than animals. You know, when you start, you know, speeding things up, you you see some amazing movements on the part of of trees and vines and so forth. So I think there would be something to discuss with INNS if we wanted to come back to that, or or getting into the whole in in a way we wouldn't wave. We wouldn't want to cover this in an episode on NS. This really deserves its own episode. But just the idea of plant intelligence, plant communication, there's some

pretty fascinating theories out there, especially on plant communication. That's a that is a topic I'd like to come back to. You know, I've thought before like what types of plants would evolve intelligence if they ever did, And I think maybe it would have to be carnivorous plants, right like venus fly traps, because they'd have they have a movement mechanism. The movement mechanism is something that could be exploited over time and evolution as a manipulation mechanism, which in turn

maybe prioritizes UH strategies for manipulation of objects. Yeah. There, you basically rights itself. You'll have to come back and talk about inns sometime, all right. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to

Blow your Mind, we recommend do so. Again. We did a previous episode titled The One Ring that gets into metallurgy and what, basically asking the question what could the One Ring have potentially been made of if it were to have the various attributes that are described in the books and the films. UH. It's a fun, a fun back and forth, So check that one out if you want.

If you want to find that episode, or any episode, you can go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and that will shoot you over to the I heart listing for our show. But you can find Stuff to Blow your Mind wherever you get your podcasts, wherever that happens to be. Just make sure you rate, review, and subscribe. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio

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