Q: Did Hobbits Have Cemeteries?
ANSWER: The question I received was a little more broad, mentioning funeral practices. I could have phrased this as “did hobbits have funerals”. It’s really all the same thing.
The question implies that someone wants to find a passage somewhere in a Tolkien text that speaks of graveyards in the Shire, how dead hobbits are buried with honors and/or respect, the location or names of tombs of great hobbit chieftains, or something along those lines.
I’m afraid I don’t know of any clear references like that other than the aftermath of the Battle of Bywater, in which nineteen hobbits were killed. Of their funeral Tolkien wrote: “The fallen hobbits were laid together in a grave on the hill-side, where later a great stone was set up with a garden about it.”
The only notable thing I can tell you about this passage is that Tolkien is describing a battle grave, the kind which are hastily dug on battlefields to get rid of the bodies of the fallen. This is done for sanitary purposes as much as for respect for the dead. These graves tend to be long ditches. The bodies are laid in them side by side and they are covered with dirt.
Given that Bywater was not far from the road where the battle was fought, you could ask why the families of the fallen hobbits did not want to claim them. I suspect Tolkien had two reasons. First, he would have slowed down the story with really unnecessary trivial points of information. Had someone asked him via correspondence I am sure Tolkien would have been more than happy to elaborate at some length on hobbit funerary customs. I imagine he would have been tempted to insert some story about a great chieftain who fell centuries in the past, or maybe Bandobras “Bullroarer” Took, and that his kin had set up a great memorial for him.
But I doubt Tolkien imagined extravagant hobbit cemeteries. The Shire-folk, at least, were simple and rustic in many ways. I just don’t see many war memorials being erected in the Shire. They might have had reason to do so after the early battles fought in the final war with Angmar and they might have celebrated the Battle of Greenfields with a similar memorial.
Second, the way Tolkien describes how Shire historians memorized the names of the hobbits who fought in the Battle of Bywater (including those who were killed), I get the impression that he meant this was something they had never done as a society before. I am sure they buried their dead. We have plenty of death-dates for Hobbit families from the genealogies. There is no sane reason to assume the hobbits just tossed their dead relatives onto some slag heap and forgot about them. Nor did dear old Auntie Petunia become the next meal for the clan. Such ideas would have been abhorrent to the very civilized hobbits.
They had no extravagant stone working skills. I suppose they could have hired Dwarves to create some sort of great memorial but a simple standing stone much like a neolithic dolmen might suffice. Such a memorial would be consistent with other landmarks Tolkien had mentioned earlier in the story. You’re free to imagine what you like about how the hobbits would care for their deceased loved ones but I imagine they had simple family plots near their homes. I doubt there would be many tombs in the Shire, Buckland, or Bree. And I think any such tombs would have been very simple indeed.
# # #
Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?
Gaëlle Coudurier-Abaléa wrote, some time ago, a short essay on funeral practices in Middle-Earth* that stress the importance of Early Germanic rites and behaviour before death (one’s death or other), and thus stressing the importance of memory above all (remambrance before one’s ancestors or memory for one’s successors).
Apart from Numenorean-based burial (which are put negatively, at least for what matter later centuries of Gondorian history), corpses themselves doesn’t seem to be that importance in Middle-Earth (at least for what matter forces of Good, or at least not actively serving the Evil).
Not that they’re not cared of, but the most acceptable way is to provide a proper ceremony for the departed, as the Three Hunters did with Boromir, rather than an attempt to preserve the body itself (trough embalming in Gondor for exemple) which may be a continuation of Men envying the corporal incorruptibility of Elves in Blessed Lands (critically as the days of Dunedain were reduced)
Mound-tombs seems to be the norm, at least for Mannish cultures (including northern Dunedain), but it seems to me the mound plays an important symbolical role outside being mere tombs. They’re memory recipients (as pointed by the presence of Simbelmynë) on which the legitimacy of Meduself and Kings of Rohan is based.
More for Men than for any other race, death is a journey to the unknown and the body remains, it’s not (or rather should not) what should be honored but the person (which is distinguished from the body, at the contrary of Elves and Dwarves) at the point the body can be trusted to nature (as for Boromir, but as well Turin) without much second tought.
When Hobbits bury Ruffians in a sand-pit, they don’t dishonour the bodies, but I think it marks a ceremonial difference netween the barrow they make for their own and that they want to be remembered in a precise way, and their foes.
On this regard, Hobbits don’t differ much from other Mannish peoples : indeed, in spite of the reputation Barrow-Downs had, for good reason, in Hobbit-lore, they share some resemblances with the few we know about Hobbitish funeral practices : notably the megalithic presence above a hill.
Now, Hobbits could have develloped these practices themselves, learned it from Northmen or Dunedain, or just be inspired by the sight of barrows in Eriador (and probably in WIlderland as well in my opinion) : my point (while I may be reading too much into this) is that Hobbit funeral practices doesn’t seem to be that different from what existed among Men, that weren’t obviously corrupted, since the Early Days.
I’m not sure that the mass grave described by Tolkien is a battle grave, or rather that it’s a grave made in emergency. As you said, it would be strange that the various families of the deads wouldn’t have claimed the bodies in this case.
I think it could rather be considered as a Ingroup deposition act*, as in a mass grave of members of the winning side, buried together next to an important center (for memorial purposes), at the contrary of the Outgroup deposition act made of Ruffian bodies where concern for the well-being (and ciritcally the “burden above the deads”) doesn’t nearly plays as much.)
Again, it seems a bit similar to what can be said about Barrows in the first book (save the mockery made by the Shadow out of it) : a mass burial of brothers-in-arms tempered by the more rustic and less warlike nature of Hobbits but as well spirituel consideration about the nature of body and afterlife in Middle-Earth (rather than the historical Germanic conceptions).
I may be reading too much into this, that said, and I’m open to any criticism.
* http://www.paris-sorbonne.fr/IMG/pdf/coudurier-abalea.pdf
**http://www.medievalists.net/2016/01/26/concerning-mass-graves-the-use-development-and-identities-within-mass-graves-during-the-scandinavian-iron-age-and-middle-ages/
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
Might hole-dwellers prefer a funerary practice that echoes their corporeal existence, or one that eschews it? My guess is that they (or Tolkien) barely gave this a thought.
There’s no hint in the text that hobbits found human burial practices to be odd or distasteful, from the Barrow Downs to the mounds of Edoras. Whether burial in The Shire was a routine practice or one reserved for those who fell in battle… no hint. We don’t know whether Lotho was found and given a proper funeral. For that matter, no comment pro or con on the mausoleums of Rath Dínen (where Meriadoc and Peregrin were ultimately laid to rest). And, of course, the hobbits who meant the most to the narrative left no remains for other hobbits to dispose of. Only The Pyre of Denethor receives a negative slant, as a throwback to “heathen” practice (did those heathens not know of Ilúvatar and the Valar, or consciously reject them?).
In a world where the Halls of Mandos were a matter of fact rather than faith, burial would likely be more practical than ritual. There were no churchyards in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, no clergy offering religious rites. Would there be private or communal burial grounds in Hobbiton, someplace to raise memorial markers? It seems likely, considering the hobbits’ interest in genealogy – stones tend to have more staying power than scrolls. Still, as an essentially agrarian culture, I can’t imagine sprawling cemeteries. Hobbits, on the whole, are just too sensible. Good land is precious, poor land generally an inconvenient distance from the farmstead. Exhumations, compact reburial of what remains… Alas, poor Odo! I knew him, Meriadoc?