# The fate of the other races



## Ithrynluin (Feb 13, 2003)

The Elves departed after the end of the 3rd Age, and those who stayed were destined to fade, for the Age of Men was coming, and their dominion of Middle Earth was imminent.

But what became of the other races of Middle Earth?
Dwarves, Halflings, Ents... 
Do you think they faded somehow too, or did they just "hide" themselves from Men's eyes...
Hobbits are said to be pretty light-footed, almost as Elves in that aspect, so maybe Hobbits still dwell here, but whenever they hear us clumsy humans approaching, they hide themselves?
Maybe Dwarves hide themselves well in some remote and little known mountains?
And Ents still roam the deep, untouched forests of the world...

Or do you think it is likely that any/all of these races faded along with Elves?
Your thoughts please...


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## Maedhros (Feb 13, 2003)

I think that the dwarves was a combination of things. They hid in their mountains and that their numbers were decreasing because of their marriage habits.
The hobbits are still there, the other day I could have swore that I saw one. 
The problem with ents is that with no entwives, there are no new ents. I think they maybe a few ents in the wilderness out there.


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## Inderjit S (Feb 14, 2003)

I think that all 'mythological races' such as Ents, Dwarves and even Hobbits would've eventually become extinct.

Dwarves would've had some brief prosperity with the coming of the last re-incarnation of Durin, Durin VII, the Ents would'nt be able to pro-create due to the abcense of any Entwives and Hobbits would've either intermingled with other men, creating a race of Super Midgets, of whom Gary Coleman is the last survivor or they would've died out.


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## Beleg (Feb 15, 2003)

I think the Dwarves and Elves faded out but Hobbit's being a species of Man didn't fade out totally. Tolkien implies in his writing that Hobbit's are still present allthough they have become extinct and shy of us big folks.

No Wonder Their hieght Nowdays is Just 3 feet. Phew


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## Mirabella (Feb 18, 2003)

Given what Tolkien said of Dwarves, that they increase slowly and many never marry, I'm going to say the Dwarves eventually became extinct. 

Hobbits I believe still linger on in hidden valleys.

Ents, now, that's hard to say. I don't think they were mortal beings, so they couldn't die out like Dwarves. Ents could be hanging on still in the remote forests of the world.


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## Wonko The Sane (Feb 23, 2003)

*Well...this is all hypothetical since these "races" don't exist...BUT*

There could be Ents just down the street and you'd never know.
And Dwarves could very easily still be hidden away in mountains because it's quite easy to miss things deep down in mountains.

Hobbits are a little less easy to hide. Even if they themselves could hide from us their cities and houses certainly couldn't.

Personally I don't think the Elves should have faded so I'm not likely to believe the Hobbits did as well.

If they are there...they're hiding...and they're hiding their houses as well.


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## chrome_rocknave (Sep 16, 2003)

I don't know....you all seem to agree that hobbits would still be here--though possibly intermingled with the human race--as super midgets  But I think that they are extinct. Dwarves could hide in the mountains but there is no where that hobbits could hide.


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## Celebthôl (Sep 16, 2003)

Well duh, they are surely here amongst us . Even the first born.


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## baragund (Sep 16, 2003)

I like to think they are all around us, hidden, shaking their heads over what a mess Men have made of the planet. 

Now what I can't decide is what happened to the orcs. I can't see them fading away like elves or hobbits so did they die out or did they become intermingled with Men, manifesting themselves in today's world as Republicans?


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## Kelonus (Sep 16, 2003)

Are you guy's implying that dwarves, elves, etc. were real?


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## baragund (Sep 16, 2003)

You may read into our posts whatever you deem appropriate .


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## Ithrynluin (Sep 16, 2003)

> _Originally posted by Kelonus _
> *Are you guy's implying that dwarves, elves, etc. were real? *



Why wouldn't they be? Our Earth is supposed to be a continuation of Middle Earth anyway, so why not?  

You only have to believe, and that's not hard now, is it?


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## Elfarmari (Sep 29, 2003)

I always interpreted Tolkien's writings on this subject to mean that the Ents became extinct, and the Dwarves gradually did as well due to marriage habits, conflicts with other races, etc. The fading Elves were the fairies of today, and Hobbits became like sort of leprechauns. In the intro to LotR, Tolkien says something about Hobbits becoming shy of the Big Folk so that they are rarely seen, and that they are so skilled in hiding and 'disappearing' that we see their skills as magic.


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## Arvedui (Apr 20, 2004)

This thread has been moved out of the Guild of Scholar's Hall, and will hopefully be filled with the thoughts of more members.


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## Thorondor_ (May 27, 2005)

I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle - they have "faded" to our eyes (like a bearer of the one ring would) but they are still around us, in a subtle plane of existence. And yeah, I guess they *are *laughing at us or feeling compasionate about we do and so on...


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## ingolmo (May 27, 2005)

I say that they either faded away like the elves due to human dominance, or they were killed by the quarrelsome and destructive humans. 
Dwarves could have been killed by dynamite used for mining and making roads. Ents were killed during deforestation as they still continue to be. But I don't know about hobbits. Have you heard the news that the bones and traces of some primitive humanlike, but small creatures were found by archeologists in the Indonesian rainforests. They mysteriously seem to resemble hobbits, as they are called by the researchers there.


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## Wonko The Sane (Jan 24, 2006)

chrome_rocknave said:


> I don't know....you all seem to agree that hobbits would still be here--though possibly intermingled with the human race--as super midgets  But I think that they are extinct. Dwarves could hide in the mountains but there is no where that hobbits could hide.



They are small, and their houses are elaborate holes, covered with grass. Cleverly disguised in little-frequented corners of the world they may be able to hide. Imagine that their windows become more like skylights, similar to rabbit holes that we would take no notice of. They move to out of the way places in Scotland or Wales and retreat into their houses and try to cover their doors with sod as well. It could happen.


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## Thorondor_ (Jan 25, 2006)

In the first chapter of the Hobbit, they are described as "rare nowadays"; a sentence away, Tolkien event hints that they could have dissappeared: "they are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded Dwarves" - or at least their race characteristics were gone.


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## Wonko The Sane (Jan 25, 2006)

Doesn't he also mention that they were good at hiding, and that if there are any left in our world they will not be seen by the eyes of man or something?


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## Thorondor_ (Jan 25, 2006)

> I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded Dwarves. Hobbits have no beards. There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off.


Well, "rare";"were"/ "shy";"hiding" are mentioned separately so both our theories could be correct - until someone finds a more to the point quote .


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## Wonko The Sane (Jan 25, 2006)

Thorondor_ said:


> Well, "rare";"were"/ "shy";"hiding" are mentioned separately so both our theories could be correct - until someone finds a more to the point quote .



Or someone sees one and manages to capture it on camera?


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## Thorondor_ (Jan 26, 2006)

Oh well 
From Letter #154 to Naomi M.:


> But hobbits are not a Utopian vision, or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age. They, as all peoples and their situations, are an historical accident - as the Elves point out to Frodo - *and an impermanent one in the long view*


If I read it correctly, it says the hobbits are bound to dissappear.


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## Wonko The Sane (Jan 27, 2006)

Thorondor_ said:


> Oh well
> From Letter #154 to Naomi M.:
> 
> 
> ...



So were elves, so is man in the long run, and so must be dwarves, though it never explicitly states it.

We all have a 'shelf life' for our time on Earth. Humans, dinosaurs, hobbits, elves, dodos, etc. It doesn't mean they're extinct yet. There are some species that are dwindling on the point of extinction and their numbers have been declining for hundreds of years, and there are species thought to be extinct many years ago that they are now finding living specimens of. Things that we as humans long thought to have left the world forever are turning up more often than you might think. Giant squids, prehistoric piscines. 'There are fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world.'

Look at the skeletons of the little people found in, (was it Indonesia?), in a remote mountain graveyard. 'They would be small, only children to your eyes.' Their remains point to the fact that they were only recently extinct (recently in terms of perspective to the entire lifetime of _homo sapiens_) and that, in fact, it is hypothesized that some might still be alive somewhere in the world. And indeed the _menehune_ of Polynesia (Hawai'i in particular) are now being considered as possible relatives of the Indonesian specimens, rather than a mythical people as once was believed. (Though their legends and tales of their deeds are most certainly exaggerated.)

There's a lot we don't know about the world, and there's a lot we don't know about the different species in the world. If the hobbits are still around perhaps they've adapted beyond recognition, or perhaps they've integrated, or perhaps emigrated from our shores to distant ones. Or perhaps there are now so few that they would be considered endangered if we recorded their numbers.

We'll all die out eventually. No species can last forever. Who's to say hobbits, if they existed, would have come to the end of their 'shelf life'? 

/rubbish talk


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## Withywindle (Feb 6, 2006)

Clearly Tolkien intended us to believe that all of the races of Middle Earth have survived, or at least had remained in the world until relativelty recently. Ages had past since the Fourth Age and Dominion of Men started until we get to the times of our own national folk tales; in that time the Dwarves had become secretive gnome-like creatures, the remaining Avari Elves had become pixies and such-like, and the Ents had become almost completely tree-ish. Now in the centuries that have past since our folk-tales last recorded the appearance of these peoples and creatures they have clearly dwindled at an alarming rate, and one can only hope and believe that they still survive in some cave or forest glade. 

Perhaps we must sadly accept that Tolkien´s great work was to give a last voice to these people before they vanish forever: just as the last of the Elves or Dwarves disappear from the world Tolkien comes along to tell us of their one-time greatness and glory and their heroic struggle with evil before Man ever awoke.


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## Majimaune (Feb 7, 2006)

I think the other folk just faded out of the story like so:

The Ents, became treeish more and more and so became trees. 
The Elves, sailed over the sea or died. 
The Dwaves, more and more did not to come out of the mountains and eventully died of hunger and that sort of thing. 
The Orks, they where hunted and killed by men.
 
The Hobbits, well I'm not to sure about them but they could of lived for many years after the Dominian of Men started and then after they had reached the peek of their kind, they slowly died out
 You can see there is alot of death in that so excuse that please it's just how I think they went out that way.


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## Arvedui (Feb 8, 2006)

Well, Elves at least does not die. 
And Hobbits have become shy, and dissappear whenever Men approach.
The Orcs have become intermingled with men to such an extent that their looks does not differ from ours as they used to. But they are still around, as can be read in the papers and seen on TV every day...


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## Majimaune (Feb 8, 2006)

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Orks did not intermingle (I think the spelling is right) with humans unless they where encredibley evil men but otherwise no it could not have happened


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## Ingwë (May 3, 2006)

Are we debating about the races of Middle-earth or of the races of _The Earth? _
I think that Ithy asked “But what became of the other races of Middle Earth?”
I agree that the Dwarves hid them in the mountains. Well, maybe they live in the mountains near the other races, but they cannot be found because of the secret gates… The Gates of Moria are good example. It was very difficult to Gandalf to find the West Gate. What if the new gates if the Dwarves don’t reflect the moonlight? They just cannot be found. 
I think the Elves left Middle-earth because the Dominion of Men has come. Those who still dwelt in there faded. But I think there were few Elves in Middle-earth in the Fourth Age. 
I don’t think the Hobbits faded. I think that the Men of Gondor still remembered Frodo and Sam and the One Ring. I think the Halflings dwell in the Shire and don’t want to see other people in their lands. 
I would say that the Ents became tree-ish and faded. There were a few forests left to protect. At the end of the Third age there were Ents only in Fangorn, as far as I remember… Is that so? But my opinion is that Treebeard still walks in his forest keeping an eye on the trees. I don’t think that the knowledge of the Men of Gondor was forgotten. I think that they still respected the trees and didn’t dare to pass the borders of Fangorn


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## Alcuin (Sep 7, 2006)

There is this rather doleful paragraph of Tolkien’s writings in _Peoples of Middle-earth_, “The Making of Appendix A”:


> And the line of Dáin prospered, and the wealth and renown of the kingship was renewed, until there arose again for the last time an heir of that House that bore the name of Durin, and he returned to Moria; and there was light again in deep places, and the ringing of hammers and the harping of harps, until the world grew old and the Dwarves failed and the days of Durin’s race were ended.


On this, Christopher Tolkien comments,


> …It is impossible to discover whether my father did in fact reject this idea, or whether it became ‘lost’ in the haste with which the Appendices were finally prepared for publication. The fact that he made no reference to ‘During VII and Last’, though he appears in the genealogy in Appendix A, is possibly a pointer to the latter supposition.


The fate of the Elves who remained in Middle-earth was enunciated by Galadriel in _Fellowship of the Ring_, “The Mirror of Galadriel”:


> ‘We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and be forgotten.’


The poignancy of her belief is multiplied by the likelihood that she still believed herself under a Ban against returning to Valinor. (When this part of the Tale was written, Tolkien envisioned Galadriel as a leader in the Rebellion of the Noldor.) In _Morgoth’s Ring_, “The Later _Quenta Silmarillion_”, in the essay “Of the Laws and Customs Among the Eldar…”, Tolkien wrote that


> [The Eldar] say that ere Arda ends all the Eldalië on earth will become as spirits invisible to mortal eyes, unless they will to be seen by some among Men into whose minds they may enter directly.


This seems to be a description of the _fading_ of the Elves that they so dreaded that even when they knew Sauron had betrayed them and was coming after them, they were unable to find the moral and mental strength to unmake the Three Rings that delayed this inevitability. 

The fates of the Ents and Hobbits have been addressed; others may look into these matters again. 

In Letter 71 To his son Christopher in May 1944, Tolkien remarked that


> ...I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in ‘realistic’ fiction: your vigorous words well describe the tribe; only in real life they are on both sides...


 In Letter 153, September 1954, he wrote,


> the Orcs ... are fundamentally a race of ‘rational incarnate’ creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today. … I have represented ... the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodeling and corrupting them, not making them. That God would ‘tolerate’ that, seems no worse theology than the toleration of the calculated dehumanizing of Men by tyrants that goes on today.


These notions about orcs also appear in _Morgoth’s Ring_, “Myths Transformed”, “X” (i.e., Roman numeral “10” ), “Orcs”:


> It became clear in time that undoubted Men could under the domination of Morgoth or his agents in a few generations be reduced almost to the Orc-level of mind and habits…


Tolkien wavered on whether Orcs were in their origins corrupted from Elves, Men, or both; but in any case, after the passing of Sauron, they must either have been absorbed over time into the race of Men or destroyed. They still existed into the second century of the Fourth Age, when late in the reign of Eldarion, heir of Aragorn II, “Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage.” (Letter 256, May 1964. This comment concerns the uncompleted story “The New Shadow” found in _Peoples of Middle-earth_.)


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## Ingolmin (Jan 4, 2017)

After the War of the Ring and the beginning of the Fourth Age, many things happpened.
Firstly, most of the elves went to Valinor and only some of them remained such as Sons of Elrond, some of his house maybe, Legolas and woodland elves, Celeborn and some of his folk etc. Some of these after went to Aman while the other faded.

The downfall of the dwarves had not come then. After the death of Dain II Ironfoot, his son Thorin III Stonehelm became king whose descendant was Durin VII The Last. In Thorin's reign, the dwarves had reached almost the peak of their power. They started mining Mithril from Moria. Durin VII led Durin's folk back to Khazad-dûm and restored the ancient kingdom during the Fourth Age. There his house remained until the world grew old and the Dwarves failed and the days of Durin's race were ended.

The Fourth Age was the beginning of the dominion of Men and the heirs of King Elessar ruled for many years. After him, the King of Gondor and Arnor was Eldarion. According to me, the kingdom of men probably would have endured till the ending of the world when the Dagor Dagorath would take place because when Elendil came from Numenor to Middle Earth, he said,
'Et Earello Endorena utulien. Sinome maruvan Hildinyar tenn' Ambar-metta!'

The ents would have stopped roaming the forests a lot because the age of men had begun. Remember what Treebeard said when the Eight Walkers, Galadriel and Celeborn met Treebeard on the return trip. Many would have with time become treeish. Some of the ents would have waited for the time which was foretold by Lady Galadriel. When Galadriel and Celeborn say farewell to Treebeard, after the downfall of Barad-dûr, after Celeborn says he thinks they shall not meet the Ent again, Galadriel states that "_Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave_ (Beleriand) _are lifted up again. *Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan* we may meet in the Spring," 
_
The Hobbits would have lived as a merry folk and the descendants of Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took and Master Holdwine would have told the stories of the War of the Ring so that Hobbits should know of the danger in the world and would love the Shire all the more. They became very prosperous in the Fourth Age and the King Elessar proclaimed it to be a land for the Hobbits. The Halflings would indeed have lived till the men endured.


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## Blueduindain (Apr 16, 2018)

Wonko The Sane said:


> So were elves, so is man in the long run, and so must be dwarves, though it never explicitly states it.
> 
> We all have a 'shelf life' for our time on Earth. Humans, dinosaurs, hobbits, elves, dodos, etc. It doesn't mean they're extinct yet. There are some species that are dwindling on the point of extinction and their numbers have been declining for hundreds of years, and there are species thought to be extinct many years ago that they are now finding living specimens of. Things that we as humans long thought to have left the world forever are turning up more often than you might think. Giant squids, prehistoric piscines. 'There are fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world.'
> 
> ...


Who knows?


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