Title: Relativity
Fandom: The Hobbit
Rating: G
Length: 450
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Zana, Morgynleri & Icka for encouragement & sanity-checking. Not to mention the Mini-wrimo community.
Summary: Size is relative



Scale is relative. Elves, tallest of the Free Peoples, built generally spare structures, high-roofed, wide-windowed, pillared and airy, when they built permanent buildings at all. Men tended toward the grandiose when they could afford it (for they generally did not have the skill, strength or patience for the sorts of elaborate constructions they truly desired - the statues of the Argonath, the carving of Minas Tirith from the horn of the mountain - and needs must employ Dwarven or Elven masons and architects lest their buildings fall down in but a few years.

The Dwarves purely enjoyed building. Engineering challenges were meat and drink to them, the bigger and more difficult the better, and thus were Khazaddum and Erebor, Belegost and Ered Luin built with skill and energy and painstaking exactitude fitting stone to stone, carving, delving, Making in all manner of craft.

Hobbits on the other hand, prize comfort and convenience. Their dwellings are well crafted, made to be lived in and last, with room for large families, visiting relations, guests and even mere acquaintances to have a seat, a meal, a bed. But their ceilings are no higher than they need to be, and they consider much of the world's buildings to be ridiculously over-large.

Size is relative too, of course. To Dwarves, Men are generally over-tall, and Elves absurdly so. Hobbits are a perfectly reasonable height, and a very respectable girth, if a little scant in the matter of hair. Hobbits tend to think that everyone is taller than necessary (though Elves seem to fit into their landscape and among their trees so well that perhaps it doesn't really matter). Dwarves are a more comfortable height, and nearly Hobbitishly round (at least some of them are - Bombur would find himself welcome at almost any table in the Shire.)

Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits - none of them are made to look small by their architecture, however vaulting, elaborate or wide. Hobbit-holes are perfectly suited to Hobbits (and on occasion even Dwarves.) Elves in their graceful spaces where it is hard to tell what is inside and what out are as much a part of their crafted surroundings as the structures are part of the landscape they are built in. As for Dwarves, one might think that their 'many-pillared halls of stone' with their dizzyingly high galleries, winding depths, broad passages and monumental decoration, would but serve to overwhelm a people of Dwarven size, but a closer look shows how perfectly the spaces are proportioned to their makers. Steps, ramps, balustrades, all are made to suit Dwarven legs. The larger view is best enjoyed at Dwarven eye-lines. No, It is only (prideful, vain, over-arrogant) Men who often seem belittled by their buildings.