What colour are hobbits, do you suppose? When I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, as a child, I gathered that they were very short, hirsute, quite swarthy and fairly stupid — so probably Portuguese, or at a pinch Galician. They didn’t seem to be, from the descriptions of their behaviour and living arrangements, quite — you know — white. Nearly white, maybe, but not quite. Proper white people, I thought, are taller than hobbits, less hysterical and tend not to live underground. But this was back in the days before I had heard of John Bercow. Also, proper white people had electricity, cars and supermarkets. One’s views change markedly over the years. Back then, I assumed that hobbits were Latins, or perhaps even Romanian, a Slavic-Latin mélange. There is something grim and Slavic about a hobbit, in my opinion, and it is easy to imagine Middle Earth as being a bit like Moldova.
This is an important issue because a British woman of Pakistani descent, one Naz Humphreys, was recently turned down for the role of a hobbit in Peter Jackson’s new film of the book, which is being shot in New Zealand right now. Naz — a ‘social researcher’, wouldn’t you guess — apparently queued for three hours for the chance to play a supporting hobbit, an also-ran hobbit, but was told to clear off because she was a darkie. Apparently the casting man said: ‘We’re looking for light-skinned people. I’m not trying to be, whatever. It’s just the brief. You’ve got to look like a hobbit.’
Ah, but whose version, whose conception, of a hobbit? They are, after all, fictional creatures. So far as I remember, J.R.R. Tolkien never suggested they should all look like members of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement.
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