The pastor at a tiny, cash-strapped rustic church needed to re-paint the church building, but money was perpetually tight. So he got two large cans of paint that were on sale, which he figured would be enough, and he and his deacon set to painting the church. They painted the right half of the church, but were alarmed to see that they had used up two-thirds of the paint painting only half of the church.
They didn’t want to lose face by asking for further donations and they didn’t see any other way out of the situation, so they watered down the remaining can of paint and painted the left half of the church. They did this even though the directions on the paint can said not to. This looked OK when the paint was wet, since it thinned into a smooth white layer, but the next day the bishop of the diocese came to visit, and the paint that they had watered was horribly cracking up and showing through. Apologizing and kneeling down, the pastor and the deacon asked the bishop what they should do.
“Repaint and thin no more”, he said.
I was expecting a wonderful moral story out of this. And I could see how watering down paint and trying to paint over something and it looks okay at first and then becomes all dried and cracked and…. you get it.
But then you hit me with that horrible pun and I hate it.
Personally I always felt like Hobbits age at roughly the same rate as exceptionally healthy humans and that the reason they don’t come of legal age until 33 is because have you met people in their 20s because Tolkien did
Funny: Pippin is an idiot because he’s not an adult yet.
Funnier: Pippin is an idiot because he’s 28.
Buzzkill: Approximately 85% if soldiers fighting in the trenches of WW1 were under the age of 30. A quarter of a million British soldiers were under the age of 19….and the average life expectancy of a trench soldier was six weeks.
Six weeks.
Tolkien was pressured to enlist and did so at the age of 23. He was in the trenches during the Battle of the Somme where he watched so many young people die around him, all kids like him. His entire battalion was decimated. So he was no stranger to the effects (both experienced and observed) of very young men being tossed into very adult situations and having to grow up very, very quickly. Yes, Pippin is an idiot and the youngest…but he joins the soldiers of Gondor and fights in a war where EVERYONE is bigger, stronger, and older than he is.
Pippin is a badass and so was Tolkien.
Another reason I believe we’re supposed to see Hobbit aging as at the same rate of human aging: the Shire is so sheltered and idyllic you don’t have to come of age until 33. No village boys sent off to die en masse in the trenches of WW1, no sons sent across oceans to fight in the deserts of WW2, a long childhood and a sheltered adolescence and a slow transition into citizenship.
Wide Spread Interests 