Please Stop Calling Them Hobbits

The little people of Flores Island, near Komodo, have interesting feet. A study just came out suggesting these 10,000-year-old Indonesian dwarves were probably not genetic freaks but part of a separate species of short human-like creatures that roamed the earth alongside evolutionarily modern humans. Cool. But please, please stop calling them “hobbits.” Yes I know hobbits had interesting feet. I also know they were squat human-like creatures that roamed Middle Earth alongside men and wizards and elves. But they were from a fictional place not unlike England. It wouldn’t bug me so much if the Pacific didn’t have its own legends, which the “hobbit” nonsense only mucks up.

Hawaii has stories about menehune, short forest people who came out at night to build temples or lakes. Flores itself has stories about the Ebu Gogo, squat people who lived wild in caves on the edges of civilization. Since Hawaii was a barren chain of rocks for millenia until people arrived in boats from other Pacific islands, it’s not insane to think small people from Flores island-hopped to Hawaii thousands and thousands of years ago, then mixed with taller Tahitians, who made up the dominant Hawaiian culture and eventually dreamed up the menehune stories. The idea intrigues some scientists enough to take it seriously.

So if you need a cute shorthand for the new species of short people, why not use ready-made fairytales from Polynesia? They might even reflect some natural history. This blogger points out that little-people remains have also been found on Palau, east of the Philippines, where Bilbo Baggins never dared to go.

     posted 9 May 2009 by Michael Scott Moore