When it comes to adventuring around Middle Earth, as much as we’d all like to say that we’d like to be great kings and queens, wizards or heroes, the lifestyle we’d all in the end prefer is that of a hobbit. Small creatures with no desire for adventuring, exploring, fighting, and completely disconnected from what happens beyond the borders of the Shire. How can we connect with such uninteresting and even boring creatures? The fact is that they are special. How? They are special precisely because they are not.

Hobbits are the simplest of creatures, possessing neither magic, or incredible strength, or the wisdom of ages. And they’re fine with that. Among all the other races of Middle-Earth, hobbits alone do not seek power, wealth or dangerous knowledge. As Bilbo put it, the heart of hobbit lies not in gold or other luxuries, but in the greenery of nature, food, drinking ale, smoking weed, good tilled earth, the comfort of their own hearth and peace and quiet. That in itself is a special trait, reflecting a very unique kind of wisdom, something that attracts Gandalf, a being of incredible power and wisdom towards them.

This is also what essentially makes hobbits immensely resilient to the corruption and evil of the One Ring, whether it is Bilbo, Frodo or Sam, because when even the most powerful beings of Middle Earth cannot turn their gaze away from it, the hobbits have almost no interest in an object of such incredible power. A hobbit embodies the struggle of the daily man, and how through very simple but kind acts can they keep darkness from enveloping the world, particularly when the world has seen so much evil.

In the end hobbits are special because they remind us that at the end of the day the things that truly matter, are whether you have food on your table, drink in your cup, and a few good companions to share them with. As Thorin Oakenshield told Bilbo Baggins, “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” Truer words have yet to be said.