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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7973051" data-attributes="member: 18">This is an interesting point generally - Tolkien is regarded as a good two-shoes but does allow for some reasonable moral nuance between different groups in the Hobbit and LotR, but overall yeah, they're clearly following basically modern morality (rather than say, an early medieval or Roman morality where stuff like blood debts and ultra-violence-as-justice were more typical). One point of nuance that strikes me is that hobbits really don't seem to think theft is as immoral we typically do. Hobbits are written as being kinda berserk for mushrooms, and when they steal them, they don't seem to feel at all bad, and even though they end up apologising to the dude and so on, you get the impression they'd do it again and Tolkien isn't really judging them for it. This sort of links with the idea of hobbit-as-thief from The Hobbit.(Also man re-reading LotR recently, the hobbits being nuts for mushrooms, smoking pipe-weed all the time, and Tom Bombadil in general suddenly made it clear to me hippies might have loved these books so much!)I definitely agree. I'm merely making the point that kinda-shocking number of people don't necessarily seem to share the viewpoint.</blockquote>