It'd be amusing to try to trace legends of "little people" to incidence of these particular mushrooms. Not sure how you'd do that though.

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irishcoffee 2 hours ago | parent [-]

J.R.R. Tolkien was on it a long time ago, now that you mention it. If you recall the opening chapters of the book, Merry and Pippin (referred to as 'little people' by various characters in the trilogy) are running away from an angry farmer... because they stole his mushrooms.

As an aside, they didn't make it home from their mushroom-stealing afternoon until the end of the the series.

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staticman2 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Hobbits are between two and four feet tall.

I think the "little people" in the article are more fairy sized or smaller. The BBC article linked to at that article says they were seen on dishes.

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philipwhiuk 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

LOTR is a sequel to the Hobbit however, so 'the first few chapters' are already after the lore previously written.

And in the hobbit there was already pipe smoking folks (although it's less emphasised probably because it was written as more as a book for children - or at least a child).

	▲	irishcoffee an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> LOTR is a sequel to the Hobbit however, so 'the first few chapters' are already after the lore previously written. I mean sure, he wrote the lore sitting in trenches during a war, most of the universe was sorted out before he wrote _The Hobbit_ at all. I was, I thought clearly but I guess not, specifically referring to the Trilogy.