I’m a bit ashamed to admit it, but I came to The Hobbit late in life. Like three years ago. I’d been hearing about it for years from Tolkien enthusiasts – my teen son prime among them – but it wasn’t enough to make me crack open that volume and care about toe hair until … Well. Until it was. Of course, once I started, I continued on through the Trilogy of the Rings without taking a breath. The one thing that impressed me right off? Bilbo’s house.
It wasn’t that Bilbo lived in a shire. Or even that he lived in a cozy house. It was that his house was a hole in the ground, yet it was “[n]ot a nasty, dirty, wet hole…nor yet a dry, bare sandy hole…it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.”1 It turns out that you can now live in a hobbit hole, too!
The Hobbit House I have in mind is one by Green Magic Homes. The houses are prefab, but can be customized. They’re made of fiber reinforced with polymer and come in modules. You can build them into the side of a hill, or grow grass and other vegetation on top of the home once it’s constructed.
The vegetation on top will help to insulate the home in both summer and winter – think the sod house described by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It won’t rust or corrode. It’s fire resistant. And it doesn’t give off noxious fumes. You can even get round windows!
You can have one of these homes whether you live in cold climates or warm. They look sort of like an igloo that won’t melt. And – you can assemble it yourself in three days. The pieces simply need to be joined together on the perforated flaps. Add your vegetation up top and you’re good to go! A Hobbit House for those of us who take our Tolkien seriously and also want to protect the environment while living in integrity with our chosen habitat.
Post and featured images via Green Magic Homes.
Tolkien, J.R.R. (1937). The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. London: George Allen & Unwin. ↩
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