A Hobbit Wedding: Peregrin and Diamond at Long Cleeve

You are cordially invited to the wedding of Peregrin of Great Smials to Diamond of Long Cleeve, and while I cannot paint the marriage ceremony (because J.R.R. Tolkien never described such a rite), I hope you will come dancing out of the wedding breakfast tent and into the arbor with this joyful crowd.

Laburnums and lilies make the day splendid and are the flowers to which Bilbo compared Gandalf's fireworks. Merry and Sam are there with their wives and children, as are many illustrious guests from the Tookland and the old home of the Bullroarer, Long Cleeve. It is a scene of the peace the Fellowship hobbits won for the Shire.

In a sense, Frodo is there in spirit, in the form of Sam and Rose's little son dancing to the merry music. This tiny hobbit lad would never have known such a day had it not been for the sacrifices of the previous generation, and I hope you share my pleasure in seeing so many hobbits enjoying themselves, untroubled by any adventure larger than the spritely leap into marriage.

Perhaps the most notable thing about this painting is getting to see how Merry and Pippin tower above the rest of the guests, thanks to the ent-draughts. Their wives can be no more than 3 feet tall, and these husbands must have looked like veritable ents to their children.

I wish we could know more about hobbit courtship and marriage rituals, but we are on firm ground, I think, in supposing that a well-to-do hobbit like Pippin would have had a great feast with pavilions and music and dancing and speeches and, of course, lots of flowers. Share their joy by dancing with the wedding party for a moment via this video short: