Fantasy villains, in films such as the Hobbit, may be victims of vitamin D deficiency, a British doctor has claimed.
The vitamin deficiency may explain why "good" usually triumphs over "evil" in these stories, according to Dr Nicholas Hopkinson, of Imperial College, London.
Dr Hopkinson reports his study of the dietary and lifestyle habits of the characters in The Hobbit in the Christmas issue of the Medical Journal of Australia.
He says the diet of the hobbits is "clearly varied" as meals are described including cheese, pork pie, cold chicken, salad and apple tart.
And hero Bilbo Baggins also enjoys sitting in the sun overlooking the garden – allowing ultraviolet light to trigger vitamin D.
However villains such as Gollum, Smaug the dragon and goblins spend most of their time in darkness, he says.
Dr Hopkinson writes: “Systematic textual analysis of The Hobbit supports our initial hypothesis that the triumph of good over evil may be assisted to some extent by the poor diet and lack of sunlight experienced by the evil characters."
He adds: “We have not discriminated between creatures that can be considered, broadly speaking, to be mammalian and those that are not and whose physiology is more obscure."
He adds: "More research would be needed to establish whether the results of the current pilot investigation are representative of the wider Tolkien corpus and indeed of fantastic literature in general, although this will need to be balanced against the problems of proportionality of effort.
"Well-constructed randomised controlled intervention studies may need to be imagined."
J.A Hopkinson and N.S. Hopkinson. The Hobbit – an unexpected deficiency. Medical Journal of Australia 16 December 2013; doi: 10.5694/mja13.10218
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