Tungo: Lifestyle

Tungo is (like many hobbits) closely related to several of the more wealthy families of the Shire. While we of later Ages—too long accustomed to our culture’s insistence that stratified society is the norm—might at first assume that he would occupy a labor-free upper class, we must remember that the peculiar anarchism of the Shire seems to have resulted in a fairly classless society: there may be ‘richer’ or ‘poorer’ families, but this seems to have had little bearing on their relations. After all, Tolkien writes that “Growing food and eating it occupied most of their time”, and even Peregrin Took’s father—the Thain—“farms the lands round Whitwell near Tuckborough in the Shire”! Anyway, if “most of their time” is spent engaged in food production, Tungo is still going to be getting sweaty and dirty, working his family’s fields.

In contrast to my Anduin Man impression, a hobbit in the Shire is about as far as one possibly can get from a ‘frontier’ character. That said, bucolic as it may seem, the Shire still has borders to be defended, and that responsibility falls to the Bounders, whose numbers we are told “had been greatly increased” in the years between the Quest of Erebor and the War of the Ring. Therefore, in addition to domestic or agrarian needs, one still needs to be outfitted in order to spend a night or two in the woods while ‘beating the Bounds’, or in the case of Buckland, perhaps patrolling the High Hay.

While he usually goes about unshod upon his 'shanks ponies', when the feeling takes him, Tungo likes to explore the brown waters of the Brandywine in his dugout canoe: