**Spoiler Warning** Rings of Power S1E1 - "A Shadow of the Past"

[Tar Elenion]

Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc

The Good: Stone Age Hobbits: 9/10

And then the Stone Age Proto-Hobbits can WRITE. Yes! This is the screenwriters READING and PAYING ATTENTION to the original. Because the Hobbits' affinity for books is somewhat counterintuitive (merry, simple farmers, or in this case gatherers, are not what you'd associate with literacy as one of their chief values), it would be easy to miss this one. But look! They have books AND their own proto-script! If Tolkien the linguist were to cheer at anything, I daresay it would be this. Well done!

This is another place where the showrunners were not paying any attention (unless it was another one of those 'well we went back to the books and we felt that was what Tolkien wanted' despite what Tolkien said).

"Of their original home the Hobbits in Bilbo’s time preserved no knowledge. A love of learning (other than genealogical lore) was far from general among them, but there remained still a few in the older families who studied their own books, and even gathered reports of old times and distant lands from Elves, Dwarves, and Men. Their own records began only after the settlement of the Shire, and their most ancient legends hardly looked further back than their Wandering Days."
LotR, Prologue

Hobbits were illiterate until ca. TA 1300:
"It was soon after their learning of letters, about Third Age 1300, that Hobbits began to set down and collect the considerable store of tales and legends and oral annals and genealogies that they already possessed."
PoMe, Appendix on Languages