Silverlode
Forum Admin
/ Moderator
Jan 4 2014, 12:11am
Views: 6804
|
|
*dusts off old documents*
|
|
|
Here's some extensive dwarf/hobbit height analysis I did a while back, with a few updates to incorporate both trilogies:
Quote
From the LOTR Prologue:
For they (hobbits) are a little people, smaller than Dwarves: less stout and stocky, that is, even when they are not actually much shorter. Their height is variable, ranging between two and four feet of our measure. They seldom now reach three feet; but they have dwindled, they say, and in ancient days they were taller. According to the Red Book, Bandobras Took (Bullroarer), son of Isengrim the Second, was four foot five and able to ride a horse. He was surpassed in all Hobbit records only by two famous characters of old....
Hobbits are anywhere from two to four feet (which is a pretty wide range) with Merry and Pippin being the tallest at roughly 4'6" or 4'7" after meeting Treebeard. According to Sam at the Field of Cormallen, they're "three inches taller than they ought to be", which puts their original heights at about 4'3" or 4'4".
If we assume what seems to be the popular idea for an average dwarf range of between 4 and 5 feet, then there is actually quite a bit of room for overlap in hobbit and dwarf heights, with the tallest dwarves being roughly 6" taller than the tallest-ever hobbits, but the tallest hobbits being roughly the same amount taller than the shortest dwarves. And according to Tolkien, dwarves are more stout and stocky than hobbits of roughly equivalent heights.
Here's how our hobbit and dwarf actors measure up:
Hobbits - tallest to shortest
Dominic Monaghan/Merry - 5'7" (1.70m)
Martin Freeman/Young Bilbo) - 5'6 1/2"" (1.69m)
Billy Boyd/Pippin - 5'6 1/2" (1.69m)
Sean Astin/Sam - 5'6" (1.68m)
Ian Holm/Old Bilbo - 5'6" (1.68m)
Elijah Wood/Frodo - 5'6" (1.68m)
Average hobbit height: 5' 6 1/2" (1.688m)
Dwarves - tallest to shortest
Richard Armitage/Thorin - 6'2" (1.88m)
Graham McTavish/Dwalin - 6'2" (1.88m)
John Rhys Davies/Gimli 6'1" (1.85m)
Aidan Turner/Kili - 6' (1.83m)
James Nesbitt/Bofur - 6' (1.83m)
John Callen/Oin - 5'11" (1.80m)
William Kircher/Bifur - 5'9" (1.75m)
Peter Hambleton/Gloin - 5'9" (1.73m)
Dean O'Gorman/Fili - 5'8" (1.73m)
Jed Brophy/Nori 5.8" (1.73m)
Mark Hadlow/Dori - 5"7" (1.7)
Ken Stott/Balin 5'7" (1.70m)
Stephen Hunter/Bombur 5'7" (1.70m)
Adam Brown/Ori - 5'7" (1.70m)
Dwarf height range: 5'7" to 6'2" - a range of 7" from shortest to tallest
This puts the center of the movie dwarf height range at roughly 5' 9 1/2", which is 2.5" taller than Bilbo, so he is shorter than all but the four smallest dwarves, and none of the dwarves are shorter than him.
The overall height difference is slightly less in The Hobbit because in LOTR we had several hobbits to average but only one dwarf, and in The Hobbit we have several dwarves to average and only one hobbit. If we take both trilogies together, the largest hobbit/dwarf span (between Frodo and Thorin) is 8".
Now, since Merry and Pippin at somewhere over 4'5" were the tallest-ever hobbits, and if dwarves commonly range between 4 and 5 feet, what we have are two hobbits who would be average height for dwarves! So it seems that an average hobbit might well be the same height or just a little shorter than the shortest dwarves - which is exactly what we have here: Martin Freeman is the same height as the shortest of our dwarf actors, and has nearly the same height difference with the tallest of the dwarves as the hobbit/dwarf ratio in LOTR.
From this, we can conclude that MovieGimli was a fairly tall dwarf; nearly but not quite as tall as Thorin or Dwalin, while MovieBilbo is also a fairly tall hobbit, being about the same height as Merry was before he drank the entdraught.
Translating actor height to Middle-earth height gets a little tricky, because very few absolute heights are given, and most of what we get are general descriptions. The filmmakers have said that they think of 3'6 as being average hobbit height and that seems to be the assumed height for Bilbo. If this is true, then Thorin would be about 4'2" in the movie and Bilbo would need to be considerably shorter than Merry and Pippin were in the book. If instead of the filmmakers' 3'6", we assume that we are dealing with the "ancient days when hobbits were taller" and we take Merry's original height (pre-entdraught) as about 4'3" or 4'4" and consider Bilbo the same height, then we have the tallest dwarves coming in at just about 5'.
The scaling in the movies is consistent between dwarves and hobbits, but not between dwarves/hobbits and Elves/Men, because of the constraints of needing lead actors to appear in scenes together and not always being able to use scale doubles. It appears that most often they are holding to the assumption of Elves averaging at 6' or more (with some textual basis) and of Bilbo as 3'6" (literally a "halfling"), which means the movie dwarves are averaging closer to 4 feet than the 5 that many fans seem to prefer. As I don't know of any place where Tolkien himself comments on dwarf heights except in the quote I gave earlier, the filmmakers' interpretation seems to be arguably valid even if not popular.
Silverlode
"Dark is the water of Kheled-zâram, and cold are the springs of Kibil-nâla, and fair were the many-pillared halls of Khazad-dűm in Elder Days before the fall of mighty kings beneath the stone."
(This post was edited by Silverlode on Jan 4 2014, 12:20am)
|
