The camera crew had left; and it was just the three of them.  Well, Ruth was in the kitchen putting the finishing touches to their dinner.  Alex and Peter, who had spent part of the day hedging and just fed the beasts in the barn, were sitting in the parlour or living room (or “whatever hobbits might have called it”, as Peter said), with their boots by the back door waiting to be cleaned, and slippers on the feet they were stretching to the fire.

It was, thought Peter, a very nice fire.  It burned comfortably in the hearth under a chimney that drew well.  A hooked rug lay outside the fireguard.  (His heels were on it; and he noticed a small hole starting up the back of his sock.  They were following traditional—human traditional—work roles, as usual; so that would be a job for Ruth, he supposed.  On camera, anyway.)

“You do realize,” said Alex suddenly, “that we have no idea what language hobbits spoke.”

“Well, it wasn’t English, that’s for sure,” said Peter agreeably.  “But, if their hobbit holes looked anything like this, then they must have had some word for parlour.  Or living room.”

“But they didn’t look like this!” expostulated Alex.  It was an on-going discussion that neither of them won, since each was arguing from completely different principles.

Peter threw his head back, leaning against the high back of the armchair with a long-suffering look on his face.

“Yes, yes,” said Alex, though the comment was unspoken.  “I know.  You’ve said it before.”

“This is what the public expect,” said Peter, in the patient tone of one who has said it too many times.  “They’ve read the books—well, some of them have read the books—and they’ve all seen the movies.  Everyone knows what—”

“Everyone thinks they know what—”

“A hobbit hole looks like,” they chorused.

“Except that’s not true,”” added Alex.  “I mean, we excavated a real hobbit hole the season I was on Time Team; and, ratings or no ratings, you can’t deny that there were still a lot of viewers, even by then.”  He paused, and added thoughtfully, “There were a lot of complaints (and a petition, I think) when they cancelled it.”

“Not the point.”

“No, the point is that a lot of the same people who watched Time Team, who watch serious archæological documentaries, who therefore know that hobbit holes never looked like this—”  He waved an arm around the room.  (It was a delightful room.)  “—also watch the Farm series.  And they’re going to expect Hobbiton Farm to be as close to authentic as any of the earlier series.  And it’s not.”

Peter took his own look round the room.  The curve of the tunnel arched above their heads and down the walls:  subtly and invisibly reinforced by concrete; but as authentic in appearance as could be contrived.

“It’s a beautiful reconstruction,” he observed.  “Those built-in cupboards, and the panelling—steamed wood to take the shape of the walls.  The beams—”  He pointed overhead.

“Yes,” said Alex, leaning forward in his vehemence.  “It’s a beautiful reconstruction of a movie set.”  He sat back and added, “Or something damned close to the sets that were built in New Zealand when they filmed the movies.  All the movies:  both trilogies.  Do you think I didn’t see them?  They were marvellous adaptations … of Tolkien’s books.  But Tolkien’s books were fiction.”

Peter nodded.  In return, he said, “Of course, there were things (such as bathrooms) that never got into the movies.  In that respect, obviously, this hobbit hole is inauthentic.”

“That’s not the point.  What we’ve got here is a nice Victorian/Edwardian blend, in furnishings and farming methods.  Much the same sort of thing that Jackson (or the set designers) did in the movies.  It’s all quite consistent with the descriptions in the books—I’m not denying any of that.”

“Scale?”

Alex snorted, and then broke into a true, amused laugh.  “No,” he managed to gasp after a while.  “Oh, no, no, no!  I’ve no wish to find myself bent over in a permanent crouch, trying to live in a truly hobbit-sized version of this place.  A year like that, I’d be crippled for life.  And worse for you!”

It was a point appreciated by Peter, who grinned widely.  “Oh, if that sort of authentic were on the cards, I’d never have signed on,” he agreed.

“No, nor would Ruth.  Talk about ‘safety in the workplace’:  we’d never get the unions to sign on to the film crew being on site!”

This sally drew a laugh from Peter as well.  Hearing the pair of them in such a good mood, Ruth came to the door to find out the joke.  “And dinner will be in about fifteen minutes,” she added, “and, as we’re not being filmed tonight, one of you can set the table.”

“I’ll get it,” said Alex, getting up.  Rather than be left on his own, Peter followed him through the arch to the dining room, and started picking through the canteen of cutlery as Alex opened the cabinet for beer mugs.

“It’s rabbit pie,” Ruth called from the kitchen.  “Call me Mrs McGregor.  Those snares finally caught one of the bunnies that’ve been eating the peas.”

“So you’ve finally put Peter in the pie,” called Alex back.

“Wrong book,” said their own Peter quietly, laying out the places on the table.  “Wrong author, wrong species.”

“Which is my point,” said Alex instantly, returning to his complaint.  “I know there are plenty of theories about the hobbits:  mostly, given their geographic distribution, that they were a diminutive subspecies of Homo neanderthalensis, limited to a small ice-free portion of the British Isles—”

“Some form of island dwarfism,” interpolated Peter.  “Yeah, I’ve read the article.”

“And, if they ever manage to sequence the hobbit genome and do a comparison—”

“Now, they’ve got the Neanderthal DNA—”

“Exactly.  The hobbits are one of the legendary Ice Age precursors we do have anthropological evidence for.”

“As in that hobbit hole you excavated.”

“Right.”

Ruth came in with the pie to find the table still half-laid.  “Oh, stop your arguing for a moment,” she said.  “I could hear you in the kitchen as if you were standing right beside me.  Draw a jug of beer, would you, Peter; and get those knives and forks laid.”

As Peter was standing there with half the cutlery in his hand, Alex said, “I’ll go,” and went through to the kitchen to find a large pottery jug, open the tap on the barrel, and fill it with beer that was indubitably inauthentic but quite delicious.  The foam threatened to overflow the lip of the jug; and he tilted it carefully so that the beer ran gently down the curved, glazed flanks as he filled it.

Behind him, he could hear Peter quietly apologize to Ruth.  “He’s at it again,” he said; and Ruth replied, “I expect we’ll be hearing it off and on all year.”  And then she added, in her brisk fashion, “He has a point, you know.  We’ll need to get all this summarized—briefly!—and include a scene in the first episode.  Probably refer to it in passing now and then in some of the later episodes, too.”

Overhearing them, Alex smiled wryly.  He couldn’t help but wonder why, given his reservations (which, if anything were growing stronger), he had ever agreed to do the Hobbiton Farm series.  In truth, a large part of the reason was the two in the other room.

He returned to the dining room, one hand under the jug to steady it, and poured into each mug before setting the rest of the beer in the centre of the table.

“I think we all know that Homo hobbitus didn’t have farms,” said Ruth appeasingly.

“And their holes were more like man-made—I mean hobbit-made—caves, given the climate, caves having more even temperature; and also the geography, not having real caves where they’d migrated to, escaping the ice.”

“And this ‘hobbit farm’ may not be authentic; but it’s damned fascinating nonetheless.”  Ruth was emphatic; and Peter nodded, looking anxiously at Alex.

They were, Alex realized, trying to smooth everything over.  And in fact (the more so since his participation in the Time Team excavation), he knew that an actual hobbit hole, whether fascinating or not in its own way, would have been damned uncomfortable.  Indeed, there was no way he would ever have been willing to live in a giant-sized ‘authentic’ reconstruction.  Certainly not for a year!

“Just warn me,” he said lightly, “and well in advance, please, if the Beeb has notions to do this sort of thing for Homo alfus.”

“Hell, no one knows if elves even existed!” expostulated Peter.  “Let alone whether they really sailed to the west (which would mean America), given that no trace has ever been found, archæologically or anthropologically, of human—”

“Non-human!”

“Elven!”

“—inhabitation prior to the arrival of the Amerindian population via the western route over the Bering land bridge.”

Alex looked at the professional outrage on the faces of his friends, and grinned widely.  “Fine, fine,” he said cheerfully.  “I’ll put up and shut up.  When it comes to comfort, I certainly don’t mind a lovely hobbit hole like this one.”

He saw their relief before he added, “As long I don’t spend next year in a treehouse.”