Originally Posted by Divayth Fyr
I wonder how you could wrestle a great tome of lore, history and prophecies into this.
Thousands of years seems like plenty of time for one book to be lost and forgotten.

Universal literacy for wandering proto-hobbits, however, does seem like more of a leap.

Originally Posted by Clertar
The Harfoots had much to do with Dwarves in ancient times….
Has the show given us any hint of this so far?

Originally Posted by pendell
That's the world that the Harfoots are growing up into; what would you expect them to be like? Their customs and actions stem from living in the world polluted and corrupted by Morgoth….
Again, this seems like a bit of a reach. From the clips I’ve seen, the Harfoots keep themselves thoroughly camouflaged whenever Big Folk are around, and I have the impression they have no interactions with them at all.

Originally Posted by pendell
While there are hunter-gatherer peoples who abandon their old and weak that is not true of all such.
Indeed, and no one’s claiming that all hunter-gatherers exhibit these behaviors—only that enough do for the behaviors to be plausible here.

That said, I’m getting the strong impression that this is portrayed very badly with the Harfoots, and apparently even played for laughs.