David Day - The Hobbits of Tolkien

The Shire

The human imagination is a complex and peculiar thing: part magpie and part magician. It is common for authors and artists blessed with creative powers to refuse to tamper with the imagination. However, Tolkien was also a trained scholar and he actually knew a lot about the forces that shaped the Hobbit and his world. Many years after The Hobbit had been published Tolkien wrote expansively about this seminal moment. One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought Id better find out what hobbits were like. But thats only the beginning. So, Tolkien himself said it: in the beginning was the word Hobbit. Furthermore, in his statement that I thought Id better find out what hobbits were like, we can clearly see Tolkiens creative mental process at work. Many authors talk about creating a character, but whenever someone asked Tolkien about a character (or a race or a thing or a place) that was named but not yet fleshed out in the text of his stories, he would invariably say, Ill go and try to find out more about it.

That is, Tolkien behaved as if that character (or thing or place) existed in a sort of parallel world where its whole nature was waiting to be discovered and recorded in the most minute detail. Tolkien did not see his job as a writer as being that of a creator but that of an explorer and chronicler of an already existing world that awaited discovery through the language itself.

This book is an exploration of the inspirational power of language. It proposes that the entire body of Tolkiens writing dealing with Hobbits was essentially the product of a list of associations with the word Hobbit. Thus, the invention of the word Hobbit resulted in the creation of the character, race and world of the Hobbit.

If this appears to be a peculiar form of thinking, that is exactly what is intended. Tolkien invents a philological origin for the word Hobbit as a worn-down form of an original invented word holbytla (which is actually an Old English construct) meaning hole-builder. Therefore, the opening line of The Hobbit is meant as an obscure lexicographical joke. It is a deliberate tautology: In a hole in the ground there lived a hole-builder.

To take this approach a stage further, one can look at the Modern English word hole, which is derived from the Old English hollow. By bizarre coincidence, hollow originally came from the Old German hohl pronounced hole.

Not content with the spiral ending there, Tolkien couldnt resist adding a few more twists by stating that the word Hobbit as a worn-down form of