Quote:
Originally Posted by Phantasm
I'm not so sure "client" is the right word for the Gaffer, though it fits from a certain point of view. I got the feeling that the Gaffer had worked Bilbo's farmland as a youth in exchange for rent, and "retired" to being Bilbo's gardener, which he passed on to Sam. The Gamgees always seemed more "blue collar" than most of the other hobbits shown; Status -1 (assuming Maggot and Cotton to be Status 0, owning their farms instead of working others' lands) rather than the Status 1 or Status 2 of the Big Name Families ("Bagginses and Boffins; Tooks and Brandybucks; Grubbs, Chubbs, Hornblowers, Bolgers, and Proudfoots!" "ProudFEET!"). Bilbo and Frodo (and later the Sackville-Bagginses) were certainly his landlords, but "client" seems wrong, impersonal. Frodo felt personally responsible for the Gaffer being turned out by the SBs, which makes it a bit more personal than just "client".
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I'd be inclined to treat the senior Took, at least, as Status 3, or even 4 - the Thane has a hereditary title and a (vaguely) fortified hall, he's definitely a full-blown aristocrat, albeit in a fairly egalitarian culture that doesn't take his title very seriously most of the time.
On the original topic, though, I guess one way to look at it: Do we get any impression of whether hobbits are more or less able to carry a comparable number of days of rations, compared to larger folk? They presumably are not, in general, as strong as beings twice their height (though I'd argue for Samwise having a bit of Lifting ST, in both book & film he notably overpacks) - if they need to (as opposed to wanting to) consume as many calories per day as Aragorn or Boromir, then presumably they have to restock twice as often. If they're able to go just as long without stopping for more food, then either they are all much stronger than they look (
stronger, as distinct from
tougher, which they definitely are), or they're eating less food per day (regardless of however many times they stop to eat it).