Hobbit

• 1. Introduction

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  Hobbits stepped into the world's imagination on a blank piece of paper, in the middle of a stack of student exams. J. R. R. Tolkien, somewhere around 1930 or 1931, wrote a single sentence without premeditation: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." That sentence became the opening of a 1937 children's novel, and the creature it named went on to anchor two of the most widely read works of fiction ever published. What exactly is a hobbit? Where did the name come from? And why does a small, comfort-loving, shoeless homebody end up at the center of a story about the fate of the world?

• 2. Origins of the Word

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  Sinclair Lewis published a novel called Babbitt in 1922, about a complacent American businessman who undergoes a journey of near-disgrace and partial self-discovery. Tolkien admitted that this title was one influence on his own invented word. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey points out that Bilbo's own unexpected journey carries some of those same parallels.

  A separate thread leads to Edward Wyke Smith's 1927 children's book The Marvellous Land of Snergs. In a letter to W. H. Auden, Tolkien described the Snergs as a race only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders, with the strength of ten men. He called this inspiration "probably unconscious".

  In 1977, the Oxford English Dictionary announced it had found what it believed to be Tolkien's source: James Hardy's 1895 work The Denham Tracts, Volume 2, which lists "hobbits" among a catalogue of ghostly beings. Shippey is skeptical. That list described creatures without bodies, nothing like Tolkien's solid, flesh-and-blood creations, and most Tolkien scholars consider it unlikely he ever saw it.

  Tolkien himself emphatically rejected any connection to the word "rabbit", yet the parallel runs surprisingly deep. Rabbit is not a native English word; it was deliberately introduced in the 13th century and only gradually accepted as local wildlife. Shippey compares this situation of anachronism-cum-familiarity directly to hobbit culture, particularly the hobbits' habit of smoking "pipeweed" rather than tobacco, since tobacco did not arrive in Europe until the 16th century. Tolkien's fictional etymology eventually resolved the question on his own terms: in an appendix to The Lord of the Rings, he derived "Hobbit" from the Old English holbytla, meaning "hole-builder".

• 3. What They Look Like

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  Between two and four feet tall, with an average height of three feet six inches, hobbits are small enough that Men call them "Little People" and they call Men "Big People" in return. They dress in bright colours, favouring yellow and green, and their bare feet are covered on top with curly brown hair growing over leathery soles tough enough to make shoes unnecessary.

  In a 1938 letter to his American publisher, Tolkien pushed back against reviewers who imagined something fairy-like or rabbit-like. He described the figure he had in mind as fattish in the stomach, shortish in the leg, with a round and jovial face, ears only slightly pointed, and hair short and curling. The feet, from the ankles down, were covered with brown hairy fur. Bilbo specifically wore a dark green hood and cloak that actually belonged to a dwarf.

  Hobbits are not quite as stocky as dwarves, but they tend toward stoutness and have slightly pointed ears. Most cannot grow beards, though some members of the Stoor branch can. Their average life expectancy is around 100 years, but Bilbo Baggins and the hobbit known as the Old Took both lived to 130 or beyond. Hobbits come of age on their 33rd birthday, so a 50-year-old hobbit would be regarded as only entering middle age.

  Tolkien sorted hobbits into three distinct types with different builds and temperaments. The Harfoots were the most numerous, the smallest, browner of skin, and the most typical of the race as it appears in The Hobbit. The Fallohides were the rarest, generally fair-haired, taller, and slimmer, closer to four feet on average than the usual three and a half. The Stoors were the stockiest and the only group whose males could grow beards; they were also the only hobbits who used boats and swam, activities the other hobbits considered frightening.

• 4. Life in the Shire

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  Six meals a day, if they could get them. That single detail captures the hobbit disposition more efficiently than any catalogue of virtues. Tolkien depicted hobbits as devoted to farming, eating, and socializing, unadventurous by preference though capable of remarkable courage when their homes were threatened.

  Hobbits traditionally live underground, in dwellings called smials dug into hillsides and banks. Hobbit architecture favours round doors and windows. The Shire's soil has been described as loess, a yellow soil that would explain both the colour of the Brandywine River and the material used at Stock, the main Shire brickyard.

  The hobbits of the Shire kept a distinctive calendar: every year began on a Saturday and ended on a Friday, with twelve months of exactly thirty days each. A few special days fell outside any month, including Yule 1 and 2 at New Year and three Lithedays in midsummer, with an extra Litheday every fourth year as a kind of leap-year adjustment.

  Hobbits claimed to have invented the art of smoking pipe-weed. They were intensely family-minded, with strong predilections for genealogy; Tolkien included several hobbit family trees in The Lord of the Rings. Among the Shire's hobbits, a custom developed of giving away gifts on their own birthdays rather than receiving them. Old objects that had outlived their usefulness but were too cherished to discard were called mathoms; these circulated as gifts repeatedly, sometimes returning to their original owners, or were stored in a dedicated mathom-house.

  Tolkien acknowledged in a 1958 letter that he was "in fact a Hobbit in all but size". He listed his own tastes: gardens, trees, unmechanized farmlands, a pipe, good plain food, ornamental waistcoats, mushrooms from a field, a simple sense of humour, late nights, and a strong preference against travel.

• 5. History and Migration

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  In the earliest folk tales hobbits preserved about themselves, they had lived in Rhovanion, in the valley of the Anduin River between Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains. Tolkien writes that by the time of Bilbo and Frodo, hobbits had lost the genealogical record of how exactly they branched off from other humans, though he states plainly in "Concerning Hobbits" that they are not a distinct race from Men the way Elves or Dwarves are.

  The Harfoots were the first of the three groups to cross the Misty Mountains westward, settling in the lands around Bree starting in Third Age 1050, roughly two thousand years before Bilbo's time. The Fallohides crossed about a century later and settled among the pre-existing Harfoot villages in Bree-land, where they gradually intermixed with and were mostly absorbed by the Harfoots. The Stoors came last, two centuries after the Fallohides, but headed farther south into Dunland before eventually migrating to the newly founded Shire in Third Age 1630.

  This entire westward movement is what hobbits called the "Wandering Days". Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey notes that the word "Angle" carries particular resonance here: the name "England" itself derives from Anglia, the angle of land between the Flensburg Fjord and the River Schlei in what is now northern Germany, the origin point of the Angles who helped found England. The three hobbit migrations westward mirror the migrations of England's own founders.

  In Third Age 1601, two Fallohide brothers named Marcho and Blanco gained permission from the King of Arnor at Fornost to cross the River Brandywine. The land they settled on the west bank became the Shire. That year became year 1 in the Shire Reckoning. The first Thain of the Shire was a hobbit named Bucca of the Marish, who founded the Oldbuck family, which later crossed the Brandywine, founded the separate land of Buckland, and renamed itself Brandybuck.

• 6. Mediators Between Worlds

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  Tolkien scholars Shippey and Dimitra Fimi have described hobbits as misfits in Middle-earth's heroic cultures, societies modelled on ancient Rome and the Anglo-Saxons. Tolkien placed the Shire in a world he had personally experienced, describing it as "more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee" of Queen Victoria, which fell in 1897.

  Fimi catalogues the hobbits' material world as strikingly modern: umbrellas, camping kettles, safety matches, clocks, pocket handkerchiefs, fish and chips, and a daily postal service. Sam Gamgee thinks longingly of fish and chips during his journey to Mordor. The dragon firework at Bilbo's party rushes overhead "like an express train". Tolkien's own drawings of Bag End show a clock and a barometer on the walls.

  Shippey calls this a "creative anachronism" and argues it is the essential function of hobbits in the narrative: they bridge the gap between the reader's modern life and the dangerous ancient world of Middle-earth. Their very presence makes an otherwise remote heroic epic feel habitable.

  The Tolkien critic Paul H. Kocher takes this further, arguing that Tolkien's techniques require readers to see hobbits as moral stand-ins for ordinary people placed under extraordinary pressure. Frodo becomes, in Kocher's reading, the symbolic conscience of the hobbit race. Tolkien wrote "Leaf by Niggle" at the same time as the first nine chapters of The Lord of the Rings; its painter Niggle dies before completing his great canvas, undone by a heart that made him "uncomfortable more often than it made him do anything". Gandalf, after Frodo's wounding on Weathertop, speculates that the hobbit "may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can".

• 7. In Popular Culture

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  Dungeons and Dragons adopted the term halfling as an alternative to hobbit for legal reasons, and the halfling race has since appeared in the works of fantasy authors including Terry Brooks, Jack Vance, and Clifford D. Simak.

  For Peter Jackson's film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the prosthetics workshop Weta Workshop spent a full year developing hobbit feet: large and furry enough to look the part, yet functional as footwear for the actors. The four lead hobbit actors wore 1,800 pairs in total during production, and each actor also underwent face casts to create the pointed ears and slightly false nose the role required.

  The streaming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which began in 2022, drew fierce debate about its handling of race, including racist attacks on the actors playing the Harfoots. The fantasy author Neil Gaiman responded by quoting Tolkien's own description of the Harfoots as "browner of skin" than other hobbits, arguing that anyone objecting to the casting had either not read the source or was being racist. Commentators also noted that the Harfoots in the series speak in Irish accents, behave as friendly peasants, and are accompanied by Celtic music, observations that drew comparisons to the 19th century caricaturist John Leech's depictions of the Irish in Punch magazine.

  In 2004, skeletal remains of diminutive paleolithic hominids were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores. The species was formally named Homo floresiensis after the island, but the discoverers informally called them "Hobbits" in articles published in the scientific journal Nature. Like Tolkien's creation, Homo floresiensis grew no larger than a three-year-old modern child and had proportionately larger feet than modern humans. The comic horror rock band Rosemary's Billygoat recorded a song called "Hobbit Feet" that attracted more than 100 pieces of hate mail from Tolkien fans, according to lead singer Mike Odd.