Tracking the Elusive Hobbit (In Its Pre-Shire Den)

A short way into The Hobbit, the narrator—as though suddenly aware of reader ignorance—pauses to fill the audience in on hobbits and hobbit traits. What we learn, in essence, is that hobbits are "a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded dwarves"; hobbits themselves have no beards. There is "little or no magic" about hobbits. They tend to be "fat in the stomach"; they "dress in bright colors"; they "wear no shoes" (having leathery, hairy feet), and they have "long clever brown fingers, good-natured faces, and deep fruity laughs" (H, I, 30).

This, as the narrator claims, may be "enough to go on with," but it has not been enough to satisfy Tolkien fans. Not even the additional material offered in the Prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring (facts about hobbit history and hobbit society) has ever seemed enough. What remains unanswered, what has continued to intrigue Tolkien enthusiasts, are uncertainties about hobbit origins—both the very idea of hobbits and the word hobbit itself. We know how Tolkien came to write the opening sentence of The Hobbit, how he came upon a blank sheet while correcting School Certificate papers and found himself scribbling: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." "I did not and do not know why," he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955 (Letters 215).

Tolkien at first believed he had invented hobbit. Before long, however, other possibilities emerged, possibilities that Tolkien could not always ignore. "One cannot exclude," Tolkien admitted to Roger Lancelyn Green, "the possibility that buried childhood memories might suddenly rise to the surface long after (in my case after 35-40 years), though they might be quite differently applied" (Letters 407).

Archaic words, dialect words, and names for various folklore beings—all of them similar in sound to hobbit—were suggested as Tolkien's source, words such as hobbity-hoy, hobgoblin, hobyah, or the Scottish hubbit, hubbet, and hobbet. Words outside of folklore were offered up as well: rabbit (a possibility Tolkien forcefully rejected) and even Babbitt,¹ (offhandedly mentioned by Tolkien himself during in a 1968 interview).² All this and much more can be found in Donald O'Brien's 1989 essay "On the Origin of the Name 'Hobbit.'" And to O'Brien's list should be added Lady Charlotte Guest's 1849 reference to an Arthurian figure called the "Half-man (Habit)," a name that comes surprisingly close to Tolkien's Halfling hobbits.³

It was only later, long after hobbits had gained a firm cultural footing, that Tolkien came up with his own linguistic explanation of their name as a "worn-down form" of the Old English holbytla, or hole-builder (RK, Appendix F, II, 416),⁴ but even this inventive philological theory failed to close the matter. In 1977 (four years after Tolkien's death), an earlier use of hobbit—as a name for a supernatural being—was discovered in The Denham Tracts, a two-volume collection of folklore material published in 1892 and 1895.⁵ There is no proof, however, that Tolkien read The Denham Tracts. He therefore may or may not have been influenced by them, just as he may or may not have been influenced by any number of other similar sounding names and words suggested by researchers and fans.

So what do we have? One linguistic explanation created by the author long after the fact, some word associations (rabbit and Babbitt, for instance), and an extensive collection of archaic words or names that existed in the language and lore of Britain long before Tolkien wrote his hobbit sentence on that blank sheet of paper. Among these possibilities, only rabbits (with their timidity), Babbitt (with his middleclass associations), and Tolkien's hole-builder suggest anything of hobbit nature, and even they fall far short of depicting the amiable, comfort-loving Shire-dwellers of Tolkien's created world. Moreover, not one of the numerous proposed connections suggests scenes or events that occur in Tolkien's stories.

Nonetheless, parallels to Bilbo's adventures (and to a lesser extent Frodo's...