The fate of the other races

[Wonko The Sane]

Well, "rare";"were"/ "shy";"hiding" are mentioned separately so both our theories could be correct - until someone finds a more to the point quote .

Or someone sees one and manages to capture it on camera?

 

[Thorondor_]

Oh well
From Letter #154 to Naomi M.:

But hobbits are not a Utopian vision, or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age. They, as all peoples and their situations, are an historical accident - as the Elves point out to Frodo - and an impermanent one in the long view

If I read it correctly, it says the hobbits are bound to dissappear.

 

[Wonko The Sane]

Oh well
From Letter #154 to Naomi M.:

But hobbits are not a Utopian vision, or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age. They, as all peoples and their situations, are an historical accident - as the Elves point out to Frodo - and an impermanent one in the long view

If I read it correctly, it says the hobbits are bound to dissappear.

So were elves, so is man in the long run, and so must be dwarves, though it never explicitly states it.

We all have a 'shelf life' for our time on Earth. Humans, dinosaurs, hobbits, elves, dodos, etc. It doesn't mean they're extinct yet. There are some species that are dwindling on the point of extinction and their numbers have been declining for hundreds of years, and there are species thought to be extinct many years ago that they are now finding living specimens of. Things that we as humans long thought to have left the world forever are turning up more often than you might think. Giant squids, prehistoric piscines. 'There are fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world.'

Look at the skeletons of the little people found in, (was it Indonesia?), in a remote mountain graveyard. 'They would be small, only children to your eyes.' Their remains point to the fact that they were only recently extinct (recently in terms of perspective to the entire lifetime of homo sapiens) and that, in fact, it is hypothesized that some might still be alive somewhere in the world. And indeed the menehune of Polynesia (Hawai'i in particular) are now being considered as possible relatives of the Indonesian specimens, rather than a mythical people as once was believed. (Though their legends and tales of their deeds are most certainly exaggerated.)

There's a lot we don't know about the world, and there's a lot we don't know about the different species in the world. If the hobbits are still around perhaps they've adapted beyond recognition, or perhaps they've integrated, or perhaps emigrated from our shores to distant ones. Or perhaps there are now so few that they would be considered endangered if we recorded their numbers.

We'll all die out eventually. No species can last forever. Who's to say hobbits, if they existed, would have come to the end of their 'shelf life'?

/rubbish talk

 

[Withywindle]

Clearly Tolkien intended us to believe that all of the races of Middle Earth have survived, or at least had remained in the world until relativelty recently. Ages had past since the Fourth Age and Dominion of Men started until we get to the times of our own national folk tales; in that time the Dwarves had become secretive gnome-like creatures, the remaining Avari Elves had become pixies and such-like, and the Ents had become almost completely tree-ish. Now in the centuries that have past since our folk-tales last recorded the appearance of these peoples and creatures they have clearly dwindled at an alarming rate, and one can only hope and believe that they still survive in some cave or forest glade.

Perhaps we must sadly accept that Tolkien´s great work was to give a last voice to these people before they vanish forever: just as the last of the Elves or Dwarves disappear from the world Tolkien comes along to tell us of their one-time greatness and glory and their heroic struggle with evil before Man ever awoke.

 

[Majimaune]

I think the other folk just faded out of the story like so:

• The Ents, became treeish more and more and so became trees.
• The Elves, sailed over the sea or died.
• The Dwaves, more and more did not to come out of the mountains and eventully died of hunger and that sort of thing.
• The Orks, they where hunted and killed by men.

• The Hobbits, well I'm not to sure about them but they could of lived for many years after the Dominian of Men started and then after they had reached the peek of their kind, they slowly died out

You can see there is alot of death in that so excuse that please it's just how I think they went out that way.

 

[Arvedui]

Well, Elves at least does not die.
And Hobbits have become shy, and dissappear whenever Men approach.
The Orcs have become intermingled with men to such an extent that their looks does not differ from ours as they used to. But they are still around, as can be read in the papers and seen on TV every day...

 

[Majimaune]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Orks did not intermingle (I think the spelling is right) with humans unless they where encredibley evil men but otherwise no it could not have happened

 

[Ingwë]

Are we debating about the races of Middle-earth or of the races of The Earth?
I think that Ithy asked “But what became of the other races of Middle Earth?”
I agree that the Dwarves hid them in the mountains. Well, maybe they live in the mountains near the other races, but they cannot be found because of the secret gates… The Gates of Moria are good example. It was very difficult to Gandalf to find the West Gate. What if the new gates if the Dwarves don’t reflect the moonlight? They just cannot be found.
I think the Elves left Middle-earth because the Dominion of Men has come. Those who still dwelt in there faded. But I think there were few Elves in Middle-earth in the Fourth Age.
I don’t think the Hobbits faded. I think that the Men of Gondor still remembered Frodo and Sam and the One Ring. I think the Halflings dwell in the Shire and don’t want to see other people in their lands.
I would say that the Ents became tree-ish and faded. There were a few forests left to protect. At the end of the Third age there were Ents only in Fangorn, as far as I remember… Is that so? But my opinion is that Treebeard still walks in his forest keeping an eye on the trees. I don’t think that the knowledge of the Men of Gondor was forgotten. I think that they still respected the trees and didn’t dare to pass the borders of Fangorn

 

[Alcuin]

There is this rather doleful paragraph of Tolkien’s writings in Peoples of Middle-earth, “The Making of Appendix A”:

And the line of Dáin prospered, and the wealth and renown of the kingship was renewed, until there arose again for the last time an heir of that House that bore the name of Durin, and he returned to Moria; and there was light again in deep places, and the ringing of hammers and the harping of harps, until the world grew old and the Dwarves failed and the days of Durin’s race were ended.

On this, Christopher Tolkien comments,

…It is impossible to discover whether my father did in fact reject this idea, or whether it became ‘lost’ in the haste with which the Appendices were finally prepared for publication. The fact that he made no reference to ‘During VII and Last’, though he appears in the genealogy in Appendix A, is possibly a pointer to the latter supposition.

The fate of the Elves who remained in Middle-earth was enunciated by Galadriel in Fellowship of the Ring, “The Mirror of Galadriel”:

‘We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and be forgotten.’

The poignancy of her belief is multiplied by the likelihood that she still believed herself under a Ban against returning to Valinor. (When this part of the Tale was written, Tolkien envisioned Galadriel as a leader in the Rebellion of the Noldor.) In Morgoth’s Ring, “The Later Quenta Silmarillion”, in the essay “Of the Laws and Customs Among the Eldar…”, Tolkien wrote that

[The Eldar] say that ere Arda ends all the Eldalië on earth will become as spirits invisible to mortal eyes, unless they will to be seen by some among Men into whose minds they may enter directly.

This seems to be a description of the fading of the Elves that they so dreaded that even when they knew Sauron had betrayed them and was coming after them, they were unable to find the moral and mental strength to unmake the Three Rings that delayed this inevitability.

The fates of the Ents and Hobbits have been addressed; others may look into these matters again.

In Letter 71 To his son Christopher in May 1944, Tolkien remarked that

...I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in ‘realistic’ fiction: your vigorous words well describe the tribe; only in real life they are on both sides...

In Letter 153, September 1954, he wrote,

the Orcs ... are fundamentally a race of ‘rational incarnate’ creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today. … I have represented ... the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodeling and corrupting them, not making them. That God would ‘tolerate’ that, seems no worse theology than the toleration of the calculated dehumanizing of Men by tyrants that goes on today.

These notions about orcs also appear in Morgoth’s Ring, “Myths Transformed”, “X” (i.e., Roman numeral “10” ), “Orcs”:

It became clear in time that undoubted Men could under the domination of Morgoth or his agents in a few generations be reduced almost to the Orc-level of mind and habits…

Tolkien wavered on whether Orcs were in their origins corrupted from Elves, Men, or both; but in any case, after the passing of Sauron, they must either have been absorbed over time into the race of Men or destroyed. They still existed into the second century of the Fourth Age, when late in the reign of Eldarion, heir of Aragorn II, “Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage.” (Letter 256, May 1964. This comment concerns the uncompleted story “The New Shadow” found in Peoples of Middle-earth.)

 

[Ingolmin]

After the War of the Ring and the beginning of the Fourth Age, many things happpened.
Firstly, most of the elves went to Valinor and only some of them remained such as Sons of Elrond, some of his house maybe, Legolas and woodland elves, Celeborn and some of his folk etc. Some of these after went to Aman while the other faded.

The downfall of the dwarves had not come then. After the death of Dain II Ironfoot, his son Thorin III Stonehelm became king whose descendant was Durin VII The Last. In Thorin's reign, the dwarves had reached almost the peak of their power. They started mining Mithril from Moria. Durin VII led Durin's folk back to Khazad-dûm and restored the ancient kingdom during the Fourth Age. There his house remained until the world grew old and the Dwarves failed and the days of Durin's race were ended.

The Fourth Age was the beginning of the dominion of Men and the heirs of King Elessar ruled for many years. After him, the King of Gondor and Arnor was Eldarion. According to me, the kingdom of men probably would have endured till the ending of the world when the Dagor Dagorath would take place because when Elendil came from Numenor to Middle Earth, he said,
'Et Earello Endorena utulien. Sinome maruvan Hildinyar tenn' Ambar-metta!'

The ents would have stopped roaming the forests a lot because the age of men had begun. Remember what Treebeard said when the Eight Walkers, Galadriel and Celeborn met Treebeard on the return trip. Many would have with time become treeish. Some of the ents would have waited for the time which was foretold by Lady Galadriel. When Galadriel and Celeborn say farewell to Treebeard, after the downfall of Barad-dûr, after Celeborn says he thinks they shall not meet the Ent again, Galadriel states that "Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave (Beleriand) are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring,"

The Hobbits would have lived as a merry folk and the descendants of Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took and Master Holdwine would have told the stories of the War of the Ring so that Hobbits should know of the danger in the world and would love the Shire all the more. They became very prosperous in the Fourth Age and the King Elessar proclaimed it to be a land for the Hobbits. The Halflings would indeed have lived till the men endured.

 

[Blueduindain]

So were elves, so is man in the long run, and so must be dwarves, though it never explicitly states it.

We all have a 'shelf life' for our time on Earth. Humans, dinosaurs, hobbits, elves, dodos, etc. It doesn't mean they're extinct yet. There are some species that are dwindling on the point of extinction and their numbers have been declining for hundreds of years, and there are species thought to be extinct many years ago that they are now finding living specimens of. Things that we as humans long thought to have left the world forever are turning up more often than you might think. Giant squids, prehistoric piscines. 'There are fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world.'

Look at the skeletons of the little people found in, (was it Indonesia?), in a remote mountain graveyard. 'They would be small, only children to your eyes.' Their remains point to the fact that they were only recently extinct (recently in terms of perspective to the entire lifetime of homo sapiens) and that, in fact, it is hypothesized that some might still be alive somewhere in the world. And indeed the menehune of Polynesia (Hawai'i in particular) are now being considered as possible relatives of the Indonesian specimens, rather than a mythical people as once was believed. (Though their legends and tales of their deeds are most certainly exaggerated.)

There's a lot we don't know about the world, and there's a lot we don't know about the different species in the world. If the hobbits are still around perhaps they've adapted beyond recognition, or perhaps they've integrated, or perhaps emigrated from our shores to distant ones. Or perhaps there are now so few that they would be considered endangered if we recorded their numbers.

We'll all die out eventually. No species can last forever. Who's to say hobbits, if they existed, would have come to the end of their 'shelf life'?

/rubbish talk

Who knows?