Famous Leisure Figures: Hobbits

I remember reading the Lord of The Rings (L+) and imagining myself as Aragorn or Legolas or another hero-type; never a dwarf or a wizard. Dwarves dig and live underground- they're greedy. Wizards are curmudgeonly. As I've grown older, and now have fewer people telling me my leisure principles are in fact symptoms of sloth, I've come to realize that my disposition is fundamentally hobbit-like. Hobbits wish they were elves, or of the line of Elendil- from the comfort of the Green Dragon (L++), or a hammock (L++), or over the main course of second breakfast (L++). This is all to say I'm looking forward to The Hobbit more than any other Harry Potter movie I've seen. I re-read it not so long ago. The dialogue (typing dialogue makes me squirm- too many literary theory classes (U++)) between Smaug and Bilbo is priceless, as are the narrative asides on burglaring and dwarvish idiosyncrasies. Anyway, I'm of two minds about the hobbit lifestyle. One part of me wishes to live in Gondor, living and eating Spartan-style*, sleeping on cold stone and having high-minded thoughts about duty, death and country. This is also the part of me that thinks it would be a noble thing to learn to work with my hands in a iron smelting plant or something. Another part of me, the part that spends four hours a day reading, shooting local fauna with BB guns at night, and forming hot tub clubs, knows that it would be a sin against my nature to take up the Gondorian symbol of the White Tree and fight for Aragorn son of Arathorn. This part favours the life of the Shire.

*there's a good bit in Patrick Leigh Fermor's book "Words of Mercury" about gluttony and the Renaissance. Essentially, his tongue-in-cheek thesis is that Raphael, or da Vinci, couldn't possible have painted what they did on a diet such as we have today. It's all olives and scarcity; lean physical comfort.