Characters
I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.
— Bilbo · The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Behind the line May contain spoilers.
Our reading
An editorial interpretation.
The repeated halves make Bilbo’s judgment difficult to sort out as it is spoken. Beneath the arithmetic, he admits both knowing people less well than he wishes and liking some less than they deserve. The tangled phrasing makes self-criticism sound uncomfortably close to an insult.
Context reviewed