Quotes on Costume and Character Traits:

"[Hobbits] dressed in bright colours, being notably fond of yellow and green; but they seldom wore shoes, since their feet had tough leathery soles and were clad in a thick curling hair, much like the hair of their heads, which was commonly brown....Their faces were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful, broad, bright-eyed, red-cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking'"(Tolkien 2).

"The social structure of the Shire seems to have been rather simple. There were a few members of the landed gentry, who were well enough off not to have to work, but most Hobbits were farmers, tradesmen, or laborers . . . The Shire was primarily agricultural" (Foster 447).

"Working against the clock, Ngila [Dickson] established a Hobbit look: 'I saw them as rustic, unrefined, cheerfully colorful and childlike as they head into a world that grows increasingly blacker and bleaker. So I decided to dress them in an English style-somewhere in the region of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries - but mucked about with so that it was slightly off-kilter: sleeves and trouser legs that were short, pockets that were high" (Sibley 90).