The Southfarthing: Home of Hobbit Luxuries

When we look at the Shire on Tolkien's maps, the Southfarthing looks little-inhabited and most of what we know about this region is material rather than geographic. I've come to understand it as the source of two famous hobbit luxuries: wine and pipe-weed. The sun these crops prefer bespeaks a warmer clime than that of the other three farthings, leading to thoughts of leisure and enjoyment. I've envisioned a richer, redder soil here than the golden earth around Hobbiton or the white chalk of Michel Delving. The Southfarthing is a place for slowing down.

Leisure: a must-have for hobbits

Does something in you reject prevalent messaging that humans no longer deserve any leisure? The thing we call "economics" requires that most of us work nearly continuously, leaving little time for cooking, eating, dressing, washing, walking, or simply enjoying being alive in a Middle-earth that is still so filled with natural beauties that ceaselessly call to our spirits. In my land, the state of affairs is what Sam Gamgee would almost certainly call "unnatural." Even if we live to old age, life is so short and there is so much to experience other than work. Any system that deprives anyone of leisure is not designed for our good.

Gandalf understood this. Just before he found himself falling in with the strenuous Quest of Erebor, he was on his way to the Shire for rest. Given his enjoyment of both a glass of wine and a pipe, can't you imagine how much he would have loved a personal retreat in the Southfarthing?

Perhaps, at close of day, he would have sat under this grape arbor for a sip of Old Winyards, a smoke of Old Toby, and a chat.

Maybe he would have had fun playing quoits - hobbits had the time to become very good at such games. He could have looked at the cypress trees growing tall outside the little pipe-weed cottage and thought of his friend Bilbo's dooryard topiaries (which might have come from this warmer farthing). In such a fine growing region, I expect hobbits could easily have cultivated herbs like yarrow and lavender for the making of medicines and scents like the one we see here on Bilbo's table in his best wardrobe.

It would have been a very nice change for the Wandering Wizard when his endless-seeming Road led him to a place where he could watch the Little Folk strolling and picnicking and boating in peace. Proud Stoorish ancestry is apparent here (note the beards) and the Green Hill Country stretches off gently into the golden distance.

Leisure and peace - they seem to belong to each other, and they remind me of one of the loveliest passages in the Old Testament. Here is the version from the Jerusalem Bible to which Professor Tolkien contributed:

They will hammer their swords into ploughshares, their spears into sickles. Nation will not lift sword against nation, there will be no more training for war. Each man will sit under his vine and his fig tree, with no one to trouble him.

As you can see in this new painting, one of these Southfarthing hobbits is so untroubled that he has fallen asleep under another warm-climate plant: a fig tree. It's a scene so many overworked people would love to experience, and one that would be quite possible if we stopped caring quite so much about economics and a great deal more about whether folk are enjoying being alive.

I hope this video short provides a little refreshment in your day and that you can keep the Southfarthing in your heart and in your valuable dreams of a finer world.