Birthday Greetings #72

Oh dear god do I have to do this?  Yes.  Deep sigh!  Happy birthday to, well to, no; I'm not going to do it.  Sound of gun being cocked off screen.
All right, all right god damn you.  Happybirthdaytobilboandfrodobaggins.  There are you happy?  Let the puppy go.

Yes, for those who care about such things (I sincerely hope I don't know any of them) today is Bilbo and Frodo Baggins birthday.  They were each born on September 22 which seems to indicate that nine months prior to that date is an event of celebration (or at least heavy drinking) in the Baggins household.

The Baggins family lived in the Shire which was Tolkien's wildly rose tinted vision of rural England as opposed to Mordor which had more in common with the Pennsylvania or Birmingham black countries.  Which is yet more proof of the tendency of those who have benefited most from our civilisation to bite enthusiastically on the hand that feeds them.  One wonders how Tolkien would have enjoyed living in bucolic simplicity eating his raw food off a flat rock and writing his novels by painting on a cave wall with his fingers.

After living most of his life in blameless inanity Bilbo suddenly trotted off with a group of heavily armed thugs, stole a hermits ring and contributed to the extinction of a critically endangered species before filling his pockets with whatever valuables happened to be lying around and buggering off back to the Shire.  Frodo, somewhat more creditably, did at least attempt to return the stolen ring to the place that made it but let's face it he made a pretty mess of that and if it wasn't for the assistance of his companion probably wouldn't have succeeded.  The Lord of the Rings would be better titled "How Samwise Gamgee Managed to Save the World Despite the Interference of those Irritating Baggins Twats".  I'll bet nobody celebrates Sam's birthday.

Despite my confident assertion of 22nd September as the birthdate of both the Baggins loons the Wikipedia page I was appalled to discover existed does note that discrepancies between the Shire Calendar and the Gregorian Calendar (the one we use) mean there is some debate about when to celebrate.  So let me get this straight, somebody has made an intense study of a non existent calendar and attempted to reconcile that piece of fiction with a dating system we actually use in the real world.  And there is "some debate" as to the accuracy of the results.  No shit!

I would dearly like to sit in on such a debate.  Well, no I wouldn't.  I can't imagine anything I would less like but I would like to know where such a debate was taking place.  So that I could inform the authorities and have the participants taken into care.

Some people celebrate "Hobbit Day" as it is known by having parties in the way the Hobbits did.  Fortunately Tolkien (possibly with an eye to future fans) made these parties pretty much like our own with food, dancing, fireworks etcetera.  I personally would have been more impressed if he had included torture, human sacrifice and the eating of dung just so I could watch cosplayers abuse themselves horribly in the interests of literary realism.  Other, possibly less extreme, Hobbit freaks simply celebrate by going barefoot as the Hobbits did.

If you're walking down the street and you see someone hopping on one bare foot while attempting to pick the broken glass out of the other wish them a happy Hobbits Day.  And then steal their stuff.  They're unlikely to be able to chase you very far.