FROM THE TOLKIEN SOCIETY:
Q: Do Hobbits have big feet? Are they fat?
A:
No, Hobbits don't have big feet. Mr. Proudfoot (and no doubt his family) has large feet (for a Hobbit) (and both were on the table) but no other Hobbit is described as having big feet. The idea that Hobbits have big feet seems to have begun with the Brothers Hildebrant, who did numerous popular illustrations in the 1960s and 1970s. They also showed Dwarves with very large feet. Tolkien did not.
The main description of Hobbits in LotR is in the Prologue: For they are a little people, smaller than Dwarves; less stout and stocky, that is, even when they are not actually much shorter. Their height is variable, ranging between two and four feet of our measure ... Bandobras Took ... was four foot five and able to ride a horse. He was surpassed in all Hobbit records only by two famous characters of old. That story is told in LotR. Ironic then that poor Merry was left behind by the Theoden because he wasn't large enough to ride one of their war-horses. Merry eventually grew taller than Bandobras (possibly in revenge for being left behind by Theoden). (No: it was the Entdraught that did it, and Pippin grew too.)
Tolkien goes on: ... 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 ... and further: The Harfoots were browner of skin, smaller and shorter, and they were beardless and bootless; their hands and feet were neat and nimble ... the Stoors were broader, heavier in build; their feet and hands were larger ... the Fallohides were fairer of skin and also of hair, and they were taller and slimmer than the others ... And he says The Harfoots ... were the most normal and representative variety of Hobbit and also the most settled. The four Hobbits of the Fellowship appear to have been Harfoots with (in the case of Merry, Pippin and Frodo at least) some Fallohide ancestry.
Humans who go barefoot all their lives often develop feet wider and stronger than modern feet, but not feet which are abnormally long (or rubber). The quartermasters of Lord of the Rings movie could have saved the cost, and the fitting time, and the discomfort to the actors of all those rubber feet and invested in some good curly wigs for the actors' feet instead!
As for being stout, Tolkien says often that the Hobbits enjoyed eating and drinking. People who do hard physical work (like farming) can eat lots without becoming fat. The average Hobbit however appears to have been at least well-covered. Fattish in the stomach, shortish in the leg, remarks Tolkien in Letter 27. But they were not always stout. Like humans, they were inclined to expand as they got older. In Rivendell ('Many Meetings'), Frodo finds that Looking in a mirror he was startled to see a much thinner reflection of himself than he remembered: it looked remarkably like the young nephew of Bilbo who used to go tramping with his uncle in the Shire ... Frodo, who is middle-aged, has been getting stout, but he soon thins down again when he starts walking. (And running.)
Pippin says to Bergil son of Beregond in Minas Tirith, I am nearly twnety-nine ... though I am but four feet, and not likely to grow any more, save sideways. Pippin is young - somewhat like a twenty-year-old human - and clearly expects to be broader when older. He was wrong about growing upwards, though (see above, Entdraught).
It is a tradition among film-makers and some illustrators to make Sam Gamgee fat.
In the story, Sam is never called fat, and as a young Hobbit (and a hard worker) is probably fitter than any of them. Pauline Baynes's illustration of the Fellowship, done while Tolkien was alive, shows all four hobbits of much the same build. In the movie The Two Towers, Gollum calls Sam stupid fat hobbit (which always gets a laugh).
In the book, Gollum calls Sam cross, rude, nasty, suspicious, not nice and Nasssty. And silly (several times), along with thinking him stupid and slow (wrongly, as it happens). But never fat.
Why make Sam fat? It could be "Watsonisation". In Sherlock Holmes movies (not in the books), Dr. Watson is sometimes made into a stout, bumbling fool, apparently for a low-cost laugh. (Sean Astin, who plays Sam in the movies, was told by his agent to put on weight or the part would go to a fat guy in England, rumoured to be comedian Johnny Vegas. Fine comedian though Vegas is, it's a scary thought that Peter Jackson might have seen in him the image of Sam Gamgee. However, Sean dutifully put on weight and remarked to one interviewer that he stopped when he realised that PJ would be happy for him to go on getting fatter indefinitely. The movie does not explain why their Sam is more or less the same size when he leaves Hobbiton and when he reaches Mouth Doom after some weeks of semi-starvation.) Hoever, the makers of the current Lord of the Rings movies may have made Sam stout, but at least they haven't made him a fool.
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