Inspiration for hobbits?

[Lail]

I had a brief conversation with someone new to Middle-earth recently in which they asked me: where did the inspiration for hobbits come from? To which, I had absolutely no idea.

I know the Shire was heavily inspired by the English countryside. Does anyone know anything about what inspired hobbits?

[Winddancer]

Wasn't he grading papers when it suddenly popped into his head? Probably also influenced by having visited Camp Hill, Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. Apparently that place is studded with holes and the folklore seems to believe that they were inhabited by a race of small people. Eh, what do I know :P

[Lail]

Ooo very interesting! Clearly you know more than me, tell me more! Honestly, I was lazy and didn't google this or do any researching at all before posting because I guess I thought a discussion would be more fun. I did just briefly look up Lydney Park, though, and 1) the gardens/grounds there look lovely and 2) there were tunnels there supposedly/possibly for mining iron. I didn't dip into any of the folklore yet but that totally makes sense.

[Winddancer]

Uh that's all I know, lol. Sorry! :P I am sure one the actual lorists will be by shortly and tell me I am completely wrong, or something like that :P

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Winddancer, you are wrong, completely, and something more than that.

Edit. But, yes, sigh. I cannot resist temptation. As you say is right - he was grading papers.

PS Edit. Also: Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. Right again. John Rateliff says the story composed 1930-1933, but in one letter (to Auden) Tolkien asserts a few years (and the Map of Thror) between grading papers and composing the story, so in the late 1920s when Tolkien was grading papers he was also considering the etymology of the godling of Lydney Park.

Probably also right on the holes. Lore mic to @Winddancer on hobbits.

[Winddancer]

[Troelsfo]

Wasn't he grading papers when it suddenly popped into his head? Probably also influenced by having visited Camp Hill, Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. Apparently that place is studded with holes and the folklore seems to believe that they were inhabited by a race of small people. Eh, what do I know :P

Just a single point ... Tolkien did not visit Lydney Park. All evidence suggests that he was exclusively in letter contact with the Wheelers when he was hired to contribute the essay on “The Name Nodens” to their Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire (OUP, 1932).

Also, just to hammer in this point ... There is no shred of evidence, not even a hint of evidence, that Tolkien ever knew about the Vyne Ring.

As for the rest of this story, lets look at what @Chrysophylax Dives has to say ...

@Winddancer, you are wrong, completely, and something more than that.

As you said ...

Also, the dates are wrong – Tolkien had definitely started writing The Hobbit before he got involved in contributing to the Wheeler report.

Edit. But, yes, sigh. I cannot resist temptation. As you say is right - he was grading papers.

That particular bit seems to have been very stable whenever he told of this, and he even claimed to have a clear memory of writing that opening sentence on an empty page of the paper he was grading, so I do believe that we can trust his recollection on this.

PS Edit. Also: Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. Right again. John Rateliff says the story composed 1930-1933, but in one letter (to Auden) Tolkien asserts a few years (and the Map of Thror) between grading papers and composing the story, so in the late 1920s when Tolkien was grading papers he was also considering the etymology of the godling of Lydney Park.

I hate to contradict you, but while the excavation itself was in 1928-9, there is nothing to indicate that Tolkien was in any way involved or even knew about the excavations before he was invited to contribute the essay on “The Name Nodens”, which was not until after the excavations had finished, but before December 1931 (where Wheeler writes to Tolkien, returning a note on Nodens that Tolkien had written at some earlier point, but probably not much earlier).

Whatever Rateliff believed his late dating of The Hobbit must now (after the 2018 publication of Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth) be rejected.

Scull and Hammond tentatively dates the opening words of The Hobbit (the paper grading) to summer 1926 at the earliest, and definitely not later than summer 1929. On New Year's Day 1930 John noted in his diary that their father was reading to them from The Hobbit:

pp. 511–13, entry for The Hobbit: According to Catherine McIlwaine in Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (2018), p. 290, Tolkien’s son John ‘recorded in his diary for New Year’s Day 1930, “In the Afternoon we played in the Nursery. After tea Daddy read ‘The Hobbit’.”‘ From this evidence it is clear that Tolkien’s memory of writing the first words of The Hobbit in 20 Northmoor Road, to which the Tolkien family moved (from no. 22) on 14 January 1930, cannot be correct, and that his story was already in development by the end of 1929.
From “Addenda and Corrigenda to The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide Revised and Enlarged Edition (2017) Vols. 2 & 3: Reader’s Guide”

Despite the uncertainties involved in all these dates, I dare say that we can safely assert that Tolkien did not know about the Lydney Part excavation (at least beyond any general reports in newspapers) when he first imagined the what a hobbit was, and he had at that point not been involved in considerations of the name Nodens. The Lydney Park excavations, therefore, can be safely concluded to have not influenced the initial conceptualisation of hobbits. We can, of course, not preclude that they can have influenced later developments, but the fact that they were small, hole-dwelling creatures was established from the beginning.

Also, this does, of course, not prevent what would be a shared source situation; i.e. that both things – theories and interpretations of the results of the Lydney Park excavation and the evolution of hobbits – developed with heavy influence from the same general ideas about English pre-history.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Falaneth & @Winddancer, O well played, very well done!

@Troelsfo, for someone who professes not to like The Hobbit you have sure read a lot about its composition :) I was unaware that Rateliff's 1930-1933 dating had been challenged and will look into it (though he deals with the quote from John Tolkien you give above).

But you make heavy weather of light banter and appear to be fighting some bogies introduced only by yourself. Whether Tolkien *visisted* Lydney Park is beside the point, which is merely that the etymology of Nodens is, in time, the closest scholarly composition to The Hobbit, and as such warrants consideration. Such considerations took you - but not us - to the Vyne Ring and 'general ideas about English pre-history.'

Such considerations illuminate the linguistic core of the story: the etymology concerns the relationship between a proper name and a title, while The Hobbit displays much interest and ingenuity in the relationship of proper name to title (does 'the burglar' ever *stick* to 'Bilbo'? think of the hobbit's riddling of his name with Smaug - a list of the story-titles of Bilbo Baggins, with a riddle itself a set of titles out of which a common name must be drawn).

On the dating, and the grading papers, and the composition of the story, the important point to bear in mind is that a moment of boredom whilst marking examination papers generated (what became) the first sentence of The Hobbit, but that Tolkien did not then know what a hobbit was nor what his sentence meant. The pause between composition of the first and composition of the second sentence is a few years and, evidently, the period when meaning was given to the word *hobbit*. Actually, I suggest that by telling the story of his spontaneous sentence the author was encouraging us to consider that the meaning of 'hobbit' was established *only by the composition of the story.* Still, it matters when these sentences were composed and what context we can reconstruct for them. I thank you for pointing me to a book that questions Rateliff's dating.

[Boromir88]

This is a topic I really don't know anything about, but thinking about the topic I have a question. What about the hobbit custom of being the gift-giver on their birthdays and not the gift-receiver? It seems to be unique to hobbits (in Middle-earth) and it makes me wonder if Tolkien was drawing inspiration from a real life culture, or time period.

[Troelsfo]

@Troelsfo, for someone who professes not to like The Hobbit you have sure read a lot about its composition :)

It's part of the Tolkien canon, you know

I was unaware that Rateliff's 1930-1933 dating had been challenged and will look into it (though he deals with the quote from John Tolkien you give above).

It's one of those things, where I believe that one would have to have some extremely good arguments to contradict Wayne and Christina – they are the pre-eminent scholars on matters such as this.

Also, I have searched my Kindle edition of Rateliff's The History of The Hobbit, but without finding any reference to the diary entry by John that is quoted in McIlwaine's Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth. Until this, I have been leaning towards Rateliff's rather late dating, but I agree with Christina and Wayne that the contemporary evidence of John's diary has to be considered conclusive on this.

But you make heavy weather of light banter and appear to be fighting some bogies introduced only by yourself. Whether Tolkien *visisted* Lydney Park is beside the point,[...]Such considerations took you - but not us - to the Vyne Ring and 'general ideas about English pre-history.'

That is, I am afraid, altogether too likely. Mea culpa!
I have seen too much nonsense regarding the Lydney Park dig, also by people who really ought to know better (including a former trustee of the Tolkien Society), and so I have probably gotten too sensitive, reading into light banter some windmills of my own imagination ...

which is merely that the etymology of Nodens is, in time, the closest scholarly composition to The Hobbit, and as such warrants consideration.

With the risk of taking light comments too seriously again, I'd say that one could easily make too much of this fact, simply because Tolkien did not publish all that much in his lifetime. We know, however, a lot more about what he worked on during those years – though that was, of course, also of a philological nature.

Such considerations illuminate the linguistic core of the story: the etymology concerns the relationship between a proper name and a title, while The Hobbit displays much interest and ingenuity in the relationship of proper name to title (does 'the burglar' ever *stick* to 'Bilbo'? think of the hobbit's riddling of his name with Smaug - a list of the story-titles of Bilbo Baggins, with a riddle itself a set of titles out of which a common name must be drawn).

I am not entirely sure what you are trying to say here, so it's a bit difficult to agree or disagree. Do you mean that the core of the book is philological, or that there is kind of a philological core that has crept into the book? Or something else entirely?

That Tolkien's profession affected his story-telling is obvious. The Kindle edition of Rateliff's The History of The Hobbit has 25 mentions of “philology” or “philological” or “philologically, and we'll get much more if we start reading what Tom Shippey or Mark Atherton have had to say about the book. But all of this is about how philology informed and shaped Tolkien's story-telling, and how it crept in as humour (such as his “low philological jest”) or even came out as philological remarks (of which Tolkien thought that there was only one, but his standard for when a remark is philological is probably higher than mine ).

On the dating, and the grading papers, and the composition of the story, the important point to bear in mind is that a moment of boredom whilst marking examination papers generated (what became) the first sentence of The Hobbit, but that Tolkien did not then know what a hobbit was nor what his sentence meant.

Indeed! And the papers he was marking at that point would likely have had some kind of language relation as well (School Certificate examination papers – surely in English?).

The pause between composition of the first and composition of the second sentence is a few years and, evidently, the period when meaning was given to the word *hobbit*. Actually, I suggest that by telling the story of his spontaneous sentence the author was encouraging us to consider that the meaning of 'hobbit' was established *only by the composition of the story.* Still, it matters when these sentences were composed and what context we can reconstruct for them.

Given the evidence of John's diary, I suppose that it is questionable whether the pause was really “a few years”. Scull & Hammond put the earliest possible date in summer 1926, and it was definitely in progress by the end of 1929, so you would have to take the extreme perspective to reach a pause of years. It would seem more likely to me that the pause was considerably shorter between the first sentence and the first few pages – quite likely weeks, but it is also likely that there was a longer pause after he had exhausted the first creative urge deriving from the opening sentence. Another option might, of course, be that he cut out that last, blank, page and put the rest of the examination paper away (I do not know what would have happened to such papers – during my school days, they would have been collected and stored centrally for re-examination in the case of complaints or similar, only to have been destroyed years later); in that case, we might imagine him rediscovering that torn off page at a much later date and wondering, “what is a Hobbit?”

I think we agree on most here – I would probably say that Tolkien explored and defined the meaning of the word “hobbit” by actually telling the story of this particular hobbit, and that, also therefore, the meaning of the word is, in a very real sense, “established *only by the composition of the story.*”


As an aside, I would also say that the passages where Tolkien's philological mind creeps into the story are among the most enjoyable passages – from his discussion of the meaning of “Good morning” to his remark on staggerment. These are parts that I do enjoy whenever I read The Hobbit (which I have done a fair few times).

I thank you for pointing me to a book that questions Rateliff's dating.

Note that this is something Wayne and Christina have put in their Addenda and Corrigenda on their web-site – the evidence was not available when they prepared the second edition of their Companion and Guide, where they do question Rateliff's conclusions, but cannot disprove his dating either.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Cannot be bothered to prune a quotation down to (a) you quoting me:

Such considerations illuminate the linguistic core of the story: the etymology concerns the relationship between a proper name and a title, while The Hobbit displays much interest and ingenuity in the relationship of proper name to title (does 'the burglar' ever *stick* to 'Bilbo'? think of the hobbit's riddling of his name with Smaug - a list of the story-titles of Bilbo Baggins, with a riddle itself a set of titles out of which a common name must be drawn).


And then (b) your response, to which I wished to reply:

I am not entirely sure what you are trying to say here, so it's a bit difficult to agree or disagree. Do you mean that the core of the book is philological, or that there is kind of a philological core that has crept into the book? Or something else entirely?

I did not say 'philological' but 'linguistic' - they are not quite the same, or at least, today we think of them differently (though for Tolkien there was perhaps less distinction). Nor did I say anything about creeping. A core does not creep into a narrative. I was pointing out that the relationship between a proper name (like: Bilbo Baggins) and a title (like: the burglar) touches, indeed is a particular instance of, the grammar of the story, the 'magic' if you will. This magic - albeit in a (largely) distinct form - is also found in 'The Name Nodens' (1932).

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I had a brief conversation with someone new to Middle-earth recently in which they asked me: where did the inspiration for hobbits come from? To which, I had absolutely no idea.

I know the Shire was heavily inspired by the English countryside. Does anyone know anything about what inspired hobbits?

There was an Ent there last time I looked, I am sure. @Winddancer started all the above by alluding to the spontaneous sentence that begins The Hobbit and which Tolkien, on several occasions, described writing in a moment of acute boredom marking examination papers.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Obviously, if we wish to provide an answer to the question of the someone new to Middle-earth, we should read the second sentence.

Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

From the spontaneous sentence (and after a few years careful consideration) the narrator steps to the meaning of the hole in which the hobbit lived. So once the sentence had appeared, inspiration for hobbits apparently arrived from reflection on their holes.

The next question is trickier: how does a hole in the ground become a hill on the ground, with a vertical front door; that is, how do we get from the first sentence to the drawing of The Hill (http://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/5/5d ... red%29.jpg)

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This is a topic I really don't know anything about, but thinking about the topic I have a question. What about the hobbit custom of being the gift-giver on their birthdays and not the gift-receiver? It seems to be unique to hobbits (in Middle-earth) and it makes me wonder if Tolkien was drawing inspiration from a real life culture, or time period.

Over the years, one of the things I have been most struck with by Tolkien is the way he takes something he has finished and then turns it inside out, even transforms it into something else. The birthday gift custom arises on the second draft (there were 7 or so of them in the end) of 'A Long-expected Party' - the very first step Tolkien took to writing a sequel to The Hobbit. Now - and only now - emerged hobbits as we know them in Middle-earth. The Hobbit, if you think on it, is most peculiar in that it introduces us to hobbits but by way of only one single hobbit.

I know I am pedantic on dates, but in the case of this custom I think the date is most of the answer. No doubt lurking (unthought out) in Tolkien's mind was Gollum's story that the magic ring was a birthday present, but I think the origin of hobbit gift giving on one's birthday arose because Tolkien sat down to write the first chapter of a sequel in the week before Christmas (1937), and the great hobbit feast, where it rains drink and snows food, is a sort of birthday party and Christmas feast rolled into one. Perhaps you have to experience Christmas (and children) to know that the best kind of party is one in which everyone receives a present!

[Troelsfo]

Responding to my question

I did not say 'philological' but 'linguistic' - they are not quite the same, or at least, today we think of them differently (though for Tolkien there was perhaps less distinction).

I would propose that if we think of them differently today, it is probably safer to use “philological” when we speak about Tolkien. No ‘lit’ without ‘lang’ and no ‘lang’ without story would seem to be his views, and so his creative urge is more related to the interplay of language and story than of either of them alone.

Nor did I say anything about creeping. A core does not creep into a narrative. I was pointing out that the relationship between a proper name (like: Bilbo Baggins) and a title (like: the burglar) touches, indeed is a particular instance of, the grammar of the story, the 'magic' if you will. This magic - albeit in a (largely) distinct form - is also found in 'The Name Nodens' (1932).

I expressed myself particularly poorly last night, I'm afraid.

You talked about “the linguistic core of the story”, and I did not understand your meaning, and that same doubt is still present.

Had you spoken of the philological (or ‘linguistic’, though I prefer the former) core of Tolkien narrative aesthetics, I would have agreed wholeheartedly. Tolkien's philological view is at the core of his entire approach to telling stories – at the heart of this is his rejection of the classic ‘lit’ and ‘lang’ distinctions in the Enlgish school. To Tolkien, there could be no stories without language and no language without stories. “The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval.” as he later pointed out in On Fairy-stories (I've included a larger bit below).

But you give this philological core to the story, and that is where I get confused. I cannot see any philological – or merely linguistic – core to the story of The Hobbit in and of itself. The story has to be told, and in the telling it has to be put into language, and that, the telling, is where language and philology creeps in.

What you mention, the relationship between a proper name and a title, is, as I see it (and in the distinction I am trying to make), not at the core of the story, though it does mean something to its telling (being part of a more generalised philological approach, that is at the core of Tolkien's story-telling). This is nothing that is distinct to The Hobbit, but rather something that pervades all of Tolkien's story-telling (at least, I cannot think of an exception right now, but likely there are some). I might be saying the same things with different words here – I am sorry that I am being dense, but I do wish to try to understand


And here's the longer extract from On Fairy-stories that includes the short passage, I quoted above. The whole is interesting, and I think it is quite relevant to any discussion that touches on Tolkien's thinking on, and skills with, the relation between language and story. I know that you know it, Simon, but maybe not all who read along are as familiar with this essay as we are

Philology has been dethroned from the high place it once had in this court of inquiry. Max Müller’s view of mythology as a ‘disease of language’ can be abandoned without regret. Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become diseased. You might as well say that thinking is a disease of the mind. It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology. But Language cannot, all the same, be dismissed. The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalisation and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faërie is more potent.
Tolkien, J. R. R.. Tree and Leaf: Including MYTHOPOEIA . HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Tolkien goes on from there to discuss further on the power of adjectives and their ability, as abstractions of qualities, to assign their quality where it had not previously belonged.

[Troelsfo]

Obviously, if we wish to provide an answer to the question of the someone new to Middle-earth, we should read the second sentence.

Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

From the spontaneous sentence (and after a few years careful consideration) the narrator steps to the meaning of the hole in which the hobbit lived. So once the sentence had appeared, inspiration for hobbits apparently arrived from reflection on their holes.

That is quite a good observation, thank you! I had not considered this before, but you're right. And this appears to have been first composition. At least, the second sentence appears in the earliest extant version of the story (a typescript presumably made from the first manuscript and since amended) almost exactly as in the published version.

Puts a rather different meaning to Tom Shippey's comments about Tolkien “writing into the hole” (made, if memory serves, about The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún)

The next question is trickier: how does a hole in the ground become a hill on the ground, with a vertical front door; that is, how do we get from the first sentence to the drawing of The Hill

I have been poking a bit randomly about in various nineteenth and early twentieth century texts on British folklore and related things (some of it by instigation from @Chrysophylax Dives ...), including The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (Robert Kirk and Andrew Lang, 1893).

These stories abound with people (often, but not always, small) living in holes in hills, in all parts of Britain, so the association of living in a hole with living in a hole under a hill is probably rather a natural one to make for someone familiar with British folklore (Dimitra Fimi has demonstrated that Tolkien had a quite extensive knowledge of British folklore quite early on, and also shows that he had at least some knowledge of folklore as an academic discipline).

[Saranna]

Isn't it the Secret Commonwealth that includes the word 'Hobbit' in a list of supernatural beings? And if so has anyone ever been able to demonstrate for certain that this was Tolkien's source for the name, even if he himself had forgotten that source? (Just an aside on this thread.)

BTW the text is now only £0.75 on Amazon Kindle, although free on various download sites.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Obviously, if we wish to provide an answer to the question of the someone new to Middle-earth, we should read the second sentence.

Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

From the spontaneous sentence (and after a few years careful consideration) the narrator steps to the meaning of the hole in which the hobbit lived. So once the sentence had appeared, inspiration for hobbits apparently arrived from reflection on their holes.

That is quite a good observation, thank you! I had not considered this before, but you're right.

:) The door is ajar. You have now stepped into a 'fairy element', one of those adjective-noun combinations that Tolkien says is the beginning of sub-creation yet plays no role in Flieger's reading of 'On Fairy-stories'. While still not confident I have the rhetorical ability to show you what you are not seeing, you have opened the door.

Consider these two first sentences of The Hobbit in relation to the story and you have before you the unstated linguistic model that was before Tolkien's mind when he composed OFS; or at least, you have arrived at the true gateway into this astonishing and little appreciated essay.

Having on another thread given page references, I here summarize the two-step process of 'sub-creation' set out in OFS: (1) adjective and noun are joined to make a fantastic reference (a fairy element); this is the beginning of sub-creation (the idea continues the final passage of 'A Secret Vice', 1932); (2) it is not enough simply to say 'green sun' - you must place it in its proper context, the secondary world of a story; only so may the 'fairy element' appear credible.

As glove on a hand, this two-step description fits what we may reconstruct of the drawing of a secondary world out of the spontaneous sentence about a hobbit who lived in a hole in the ground. The key is recognition that a fairy element - an adjective-noun pairing - has appeared in the sentence. We may begin to wonder if Tolkien told this story of the sentence so often because it points the way to his wider thought about fairy stories, as expressed in his essay.

Putting The Hobbit into OFS generates something like the following sequence (nb. 'secondary world' = context of the story of The Hobbit, not LOTR):

Following spontaneous composition, the queer sentence is inspected, revealing a fairy element: a hobbit hole. Our author considers this hobbit-hole and concludes that it is not enough to say 'hobbit hole', he must place this hobbit hole in its proper context. This requires a secondary world, which will take many sentences (a story), but the second sentence points the way. Concerning himself for the moment solely with the hobbit hole, Tolkien compares it to two different holes in which a hobbit might - but in fact does not - live. (Note that the 'lived' of the sentence significantly limits the possible meanings of 'hobbit-hole' - which might otherwise have been taken to be, say, a kind of hole discovered in a pocket.)

One may now posit some alchemical imagination of the author whereby the dry hole of the second sentence becomes a great Dwarf-hole, filled now with stolen wealth and a slumbering dragon, while the nasty wet hole is found to have no worms, no door but a miserable occupant with a magic birthday present. Various intermediate holes are added to fill out the map of the wider world beyond the hobbit's hole: a variety of more or less uncomfortable holes, some in others on the ground (houses) and some even on the water. (Rivendell, for example, is a hole on the ground (a house) that is also in the ground because hidden in a valley).

Once the hobbit hole appears on a map with many other holes, trees, and tight corners the author envisages a story that will take the hobbit out of his hole, place him in various holes along the way to see what he has in him, and bring him back again to check that he is still the same hobbit. So comparative reflection on one side of the fairy element, the hole, leads our author to an account of the other side of the fairy element - the hobbit in the hole.

This is not the end of the story of how The Hobbit was imagined, but it is the first step (the next step is to unpack the alchemical imagination of the other holes). No less, it is the first step to reading Tolkien's essay 'On Fairy-stories'. Once you have entered through this gateway, I am content to hear whatever complaints about The Hobbit may appear within the strange prose of this essay; for most certainly, once we have so entered Tolkien will show us the path to somewhere else - the far grander vision of the sequel. But in my opinion, 'On Fairy-stories' is in the first instance an articulation of the linguistic method by which Tolkien made The Hobbit.

Good morning!

[Lail]

I had absolutely no idea that posing my question would lead to such a discussion! This sure explains why my google search of what inspired hobbits didn't lead me to many results.

It's been interesting to read both of your points, @Chrysophylax Dives and @Troelsfo -- thank you! I do not know much about the intricacies of the history crafting the Hobbit (or Tolkien's other works) so this has been very illuminating, and admittedly, a lot to digest.

My understanding thus far is that there is not necessarily a single, definitive inspiration for hobbits that can really be pinned down, but more collected possibilities that may or may not have influenced the hobbit (meaning hobbits the people, not the story, but it appears the two are intertwined nonetheless) in combination or individually, which are:

- Bored grading papers* --> possibly a wandering mind, wrote a random sentence --> later wrote more to expand on that sentence
- possible influences of people living in holes in hills from British folklore (of which I am totally unfamiliar and now would like to know more)
- possible (but debatable) influence from excavations at Lydney Park (@Troelsfo may disagree but I left it here because as I understand the timing, it seems plausible to me that reading about it in the news could have indirectly influenced his idea even prior to writing The Name Nodens essay)

*therefore; whoever's paper he was grading at the time really ought to get some credit or acknowledgement for that if you ask me!

I don't want to detract from your discussion whatsoever, but I am wondering something somewhat stupid/silly about hobbits that I forgot to mention in my opening post, which is, I always thought they reminded me a little bit of rabbits. hobbit, rabbit, it's a similar-sounding word and they both live in holes. I guess I could try to stretch it farther than that but that's about as far as that line of thought has gone for me. Is there any indication that rabbits had anything to do with hobbits or is this totally ridiculous and off the mark and altogether almost too obvious? Please feel free to laugh at me, I don't mind at all.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Tuilindo, thank you very much for the trib request!

The rabbits are definitely in there (remember the eagle carrying Bilbo makes the comparison) and I think Tom Shippey has discussed them, but @Troelsfo can no doubt give you all the details.

Of your three influences, I'd say put Lydney Park aside. It is relevant, but only when you get into the nuts and bolts of the linguistic theory around which Tolkien made his story, which is not what you are asking about.

On the grading papers and the spontaneous sentence, I would revise the way you put it "later wrote more to expand on that sentence". I think what we see in the story is not so much expansion as drawing out the meaning of the sentence by very careful inspection of each word. So, for example, this hobbit lives *in* the ground, so Tolkien thinks what this means by considering other dwellings *on* the ground, or even on the *water*, as well as considering and comparing various other creatures who live underground.

For what it is worth, I believe that this initial pondering of words led Tolkien already to Gollum, as indicated by his introduction:

Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum. I don't know where he came from, nor who or what he was.

I have the sense that, while the hobbit lives in a hole in the ground and Tolkien determines to discover just who and what he is, Gollum is a kind of 'other' who remains unknown and unknowable. Not sure if that makes sense, it is just an intuition.

But what Gollum is - because of course the author knows more about him than he lets on - is, I think, arrived at in the first instance by way of consideration of the word 'lived' in the original sentence. Like Bilbo, Gollum lives in a hole in the ground, only in his case with the meaning of 'living' reduced to its bare minimum - physically alive, but alone in a nasty, wet hole with none of the creature comforts of the kind found in a *hobbit*-hole.

On the British folklore angle, I'll write in a subsequent post. (Just this morning I decided that it was time to gather my Hobbit origin thoughts together and try and write a short essay, so thank you for providing an opportunity to clarify these matters.)

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Well, @Tuilindo, you can skip this post really. I feel the need to insert it before stepping to the British folklore because I think it prompted Tolkien to turn to that folklore (or one reading of it) - and also, to be perfectly honest, because my primary goal here is to organize my own thoughts (and pretend that in doing so I'm answering your question).

My understanding thus far is that there is not necessarily a single, definitive inspiration for hobbits that can really be pinned down, but more collected possibilities that may or may not have influenced the hobbit (meaning hobbits the people, not the story, but it appears the two are intertwined nonetheless) in combination or individually...

I think that hobbits began as a word - the mysterious word "hobbit" in the spontaneous sentence - and Tolkien arrived at what hobbits are by resolving the meaning of his sentence, which he did by drawing a story out of the sentence. So it is necessary to reconstruct, as far as we can, how he arrived at the story of The Hobbit. While we cannot hope to know precisely how this imagination arose, I believe it is possible to identify distinct steps of the imaginative process and even to guess at something of their order.

So, it seems clear to me that the first step involved simple linguistic consideration of the sentence - the comparisons of holes in or on the ground, and the kind of thing I've already alluded to in previous posts.

But then there is a second step, a key step, which was in fact spotted as early as January 1938, when a letter signed 'Habit' was published in the Observer newspaper that asked Professor Tolkien several questions about his story, including:

...is the hobbit’s stealing of the dragon’s cup based on the cup-stealing episode in Beowulf?

Habit had noticed that when Bilbo Baggins creeps down the secret passageway into the Lonely Mountain he follows in the footsteps of the þéof náthwylces, the nameless thief of Beowulf (line 2223). This part of the Anglo-Saxon story begins with a dragon dwelling in a steep stone-barrow on the high heath, watching over his hoard. At the foot of the barrow is a passage, and in lines 2214-2219 of the Old English poem we appear to catch a glimpse of a foolhardy hobbit. Here is Tolkien’s translation:

Therein went some
nameless man, creeping in nigh
to the pagan treasure; his hand seized
a goblet deep, bright with gems. This the dragon did not after in silence bear,
albeit he had been cheated in his sleep
by thief’s cunning.

So, as he pondered his spontaneous sentence, Tolkien saw that this hobbit - whoever and whatever he was - could play the part of the nameless thief. Hence, the first chapter, with the Map and Gandalf's preposterous plan of burglary, sets things up for the cup-stealing episode at the Lonely Mountain.

This is not to say that Bilbo is the nameless thief of Beowulf - he surely is not. Rather, I assume that Tolkien suspected that this part of Beowulf drew on older stories and he set out to imagine an 'earlier' version of the story.

And for those as obsessed as I am with Tolkien's thought - note that here we have a second 'fairy element' - those queer adjective-noun combinations that are said to be the beginning of fantasy in On Fairy-stories. The original sentence gave us 'hobbit hole' but Beowulf gives us the master fairy element of The Hobbit, 'nameless thief''.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

So, the British folklore… Really, this is an Oxford story (Tolkien went up to Oxford in 1911). We begin in 1898 when John Buchan, then an undergraduate, published a short story ‘No-man’s-land’ that tells of an Oxford scholar of Northern Antiquities who holidays in the remote Highlands of Scotland, where he encounters, and is then taken captive by, ‘the Hidden People’:

Then suddenly in the hollow trough of mist before me… there appeared a figure. It was little and squat and dark… in its face and eyes there seemed to lurk an elder world of mystery and barbarism, a troll-like life which was too horrible for words.

While captive in their ‘hill refuge’ the Oxford man hears harsh words directed at the British invader and bitter curses of the Saxon stranger. These relics of a nameless past are the remains of Britain’s aboriginal population – now driven into the remote mountains by the invasions of first the Celts and then the Anglo-Saxons.

There is a hint of Gollum here, who (apparently) has been cut off from his friends and family by the coming of the goblins long ago. But the initial point to note is that the source of Buchan’s ideas became apparent in 1900 when John Rhys, Oxford Professor of Celtic (who Tolkien also likely heard lecture) delivered an address on Welsh fairy stories.

Rhys set out to paint a picture of Britain’s aboriginal population. He observes that the ancient Alexandrian geometer Ptolemy mentions a British tribe called the Coritani, points out that the Celtic word Cor means dwarf, and concludes that this was a tribe of aborigines who the Celtic-speaking invaders named 'dwarves' because they were so small. He supports this rather wild conjecture with reports of ancient ‘habitations’ in Scotland that:

…appear from the outside like hillocks covered with grass… [and are divided into rooms] so small that their inmates must have been of very short stature.

Rhys then argues that Welsh fairy stories of ‘the Little People’ contain dim memories of these aboriginal ‘mound-dwellers’. From his reading of these fairy stories he concludes that the aborigines were not only a little people dwelling in holes disguised as hills but were (among other things) also:

• Of an unwarlike disposition,
  Much given to magic and wizardry,
  Consummate thieves,
  Who took pains to conceal their names.

Turning finally to Tolkien, note before anything else that our author certainly regarded all this as absolute nonsense. He surely knew, for example, that these ‘Picts houses’ in Scotland where not ancient habitations but ancient burial mounds. But what I infer is that, having decided that his hobbit would play the part of the nameless thief in Beowulf, Tolkien recalled Rhys’s account of British aborigines as “consummate thieves” who “took pains to hide their names” – and saw that such an aborigine was perfectly suited to play the part.

We can take this a couple of steps further. From Rhys, Tolkien saw that the hole in the ground of the hobbit was really a hill covered in grass (note how the illustration of ‘The Hill’ looks rather like a barrow), and he also saw that Rhys was ‘correct’ as to the peaceful disposition of these aboriginal ‘hobbits’. But he appears to have had fun with the idea that Rhys, or perhaps the Welsh fairy stories, had confused the ‘original’ fairy story, so:

• Hobbits are not thieves. Quite the opposite - they are in general very respectable. But one, the most famous, was indeed a burglar of legend - and this 'fact' appears to have led to the later confusion that all hobbits were thieves. Ditto with the names - as Pippin and Merry establish in the sequel with Treebeard, hobbits are in general happy to give their names to anyone; it was only Bilbo in conversation with Smaug who took pains to conceal his name.
  
  Hobbits are not dwarves. As we are told twice in the story, they are readily distinguished from dwarves because they have no beards. Apparently the story of Bilbo Baggins has becomes confused in the telling so that the hobbit has been mistaken for his companions.
  
  Same with magic and wizardry – here we see a confusion of the wizard with the hobbit, and also a misplaced generalization from Bilbo, who returned with a magic ring, to all hobbits, who possess only the ordinary and everyday sort of disappearing magic.
  
  And the same with the elves – hobbits are a little people, but they are not the Little People, otherwise known as elves, who Bilbo encountered on his journey.

In other words, Rhys’s rather ridiculous speculations seems to have provided Tolkien with not only the appearance of a hobbit hole and the short stature of hobbits but also the idea that the story of the hobbit who lived in a hole in the ground would involve dwarves, a wizard, and some elves (those elements of this aboriginal story subsequently confused by the Welsh tellers of tales).

Finally, it seems to me that Tolkien then incorporated something of Buchan’s story into his own. Buchan draws a picture of these ‘little people’ as they are today - miserable relics of a bygone age living in remote mountain refuges. I think that behind the Gollum of The Hobbit is some idea of the future that awaits the hobbits, destined to be forgotten and to forget even their own names (the very opposite of the Gollum of LOTR who is of course an ancient hobbit).

You can read Buchan's story here: https://archive.org/details/watcherbyth ... 7/mode/2up
And Rhys's talk here: https://archive.org/details/jstor-16289 ... 5/mode/2up

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Behind Rhys's wild speculations about prehistoric little folk living in holes disguised as hills stands the discovery of the neolithic settlement of Skara Brae in Orkney. Supposedly, in 1850 a great storm disturbed the sand and mud revealing the coastal habitations from a forgotten past. Certainly, for the next several decades the little settlement haunted the British imagination of the newly discovered preshistoric past.
https://www.worldhistory.org/Skara_Brae/

[Aikári Salmarinian]

I know of Skara Brae, it is really beautiful out there on the Orkneys. It tells something about all lands around the Northsea area, and inspired myself to write a Mesolithic story two years ago.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

:) Doggerland.

I do not know if Tolkien ever heard of Doggerland. Maybe the idea arose only after his death? But surely such a vision is not so far from what greets us in the Prologue to Fellowship of the Ring?

Those days, the Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed; but the regions in which Hobbits then lived were doubtless the same as those in which they still linger: the North-West of the Old World, east of the Sea.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

An oak tree had always their pinpoint in their existence. What could they wish more for? Their future lay in these deserted parts. Why here no other lived, nobody did understand. What had been hills first became islands. Thousands of years would go by before the Romans came and discovered a people that hid between impenetrable water forests on islands in the middle of marches that stretched out for many miles. More than a century would go by before they were able to conquer the marches. And even then these marches inhabitants were incredible at themselves, speaking dialects that didn’t rhyme with the languages around these marches. The romans were nice enough to call them Frisiavones. And that would much later become the link to the peoples still living in these areas, of what now is called Zeeland.

So the Frisiavones, as the Romans called them, are the original marsh-dwellers, descendants of the ancient peoples of Doggerland, and include the inhabitants of the (now Danish) Zealand. Is that about correct?

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: Allow me to say, this is story of my own creation and in no way a reality at itself. I have done thorough reading though, visited lots of internet pages and articles to make it as realistic as possible. But as there are no data about those times, except what is found archeologically, it is all interpretation. But as this is not related to the original title of the thread, I will not elaborate on this further in here. If you have discord we could talk about there. I am sorry. Zeeland is though a province in the southwest of the Netherlands, not Denmark and I have a close family connection to this part of the land.

Edit: Tolkien can't have known. Doggerland was named after the Dogger Bank by British archaeologist Bryony Coles. She conducted groundbreaking research in the 1990s and mapped the area. Dogger is an old Dutch word for a fishing boat that was used to fish for cod (Middle Dutch: dogghe). I agree with you, the idea is not that farfetched.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I see my mistake. Zealand = Danish island; Zeeland = least populated province of the Netherlands.
And Doggerland was discovered only two decades after Tolkien died.
OK. Let's leave this thread to hobbits again.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Aiks,
One last; and it is indeed proper context for skara brae; this on the archeology of the Orkneys: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/202 ... ish-museum

... a story of influence and connection, of ideas travelling beyond the horizon, of people on the move. That starts with those who trudged across Doggerland when Britain’s east coast was still connected to continental Europe, and continues with those who brought farming to Britain from across the Channel about 6,000 years ago, to the “Beaker people” who arrived from around 2500BC, all but replacing them. The story is almost unimaginably long...

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: Thanks! I will read it.

Really interesting, and a busy world back then as ours is right now.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Tolkien can't have known. Doggerland was named after the Dogger Bank by British archaeologist Bryony Coles. She conducted groundbreaking research in the 1990s and mapped the area. Dogger is an old Dutch word for a fishing boat that was used to fish for cod (Middle Dutch: dogghe).

Aiks, I've had this at the back of my mind since you wrote it. Hovering at the edge of memory was a story I once read by H.G. Wells, which I now discover on the (English) Wiki page for Doggerland.

The existence of what is now known as Doggerland was established in the late 19th century. H. G. Wells referred to the concept in "A Story of the Stone Age" (1897), which is set in "a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is underwater in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea. ... Fifty thousand years ago it was, fifty thousand years if the reckoning of geologists is correct"

So the name Doggerland was not known to Professor Tolkien, but the idea that is named was the stuff of story already when he was a child (aged five when Wells' story was first published in 1897). The Wiki entry indicates sustained interest down to WWI, and then a lull until the 1990s and your namer, Bryony Coles. But there was a cool find in the sea in 1931 and Tolkien would have known, or at least considered it likely, that one once could have walked east from Skara Brae on Orkney in the very north of what is now the British Isles to the Dogger Bank (and on, as today, to the Angle and the Lonely Mountain).

You know, I never saw this before, but it makes a lot of sense of the way the Shire is both 'England (and Wales & the wilds of Scotland)' and yet at once part of the great Continent of Middle-earth.

Those days, the Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed; but the regions in which Hobbits then lived were doubtless the same as those in which they still linger: the North-West of the Old World, east of the Sea.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: Your second quote are the first lines of the story itself. I have read a part of it, but storywise it is not that appealing to me to read it whole through. That doesn't say the small tale of H.G. Wells is bad or so. As long fishers went to sea, they always dug up more than only the fish they caught. This bycatch consists other sea creatures, but also debris and old artifacts, such as wood, skeletons and tools. Fishers often have an own private archeological collection. What truly has been found thin out the official numbers. Seven to eightthousand years ago the Northsea was a natural eldorado of sorts. With a depth of forty to ninety meters in most places, our surrounding lands were the hills. Háranech sits on H5100 in the Holocene Epoch, and we sit lovely on H12.022. It is an evolutionary calender. But makes it easier to have an understanding when the story fits, than working with BC and AD. The Blytt-Sernander stages are Preboreal, Boreal, Atlantic, Subboreal and Subatlantic. And the Atlantic was in comparison two degrees warmer than today. Háranech plays in the Atlantic one.

Tolkien tries to bridge his story loosely into ours, with words that are spacious enough to interprete. Britain has been on and off a part of the European mainland, during colder and warmer periods in this Holocene Epoch. In fantasy aye, he imagined where the location of the Shire could have been on today's maps. I voiced it a bit wrongly, he knew of a possible valley, but not the present name.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Chrys: Your second quote are the first lines of the story itself. I have read a part of it, but storywise it is not that appealing to me to read it whole through. That doesn't say the small tale of H.G. Wells is bad or so.

Of course, because you are a Tolkien fanatic. I think Wells had quite an influence on Tolkien, who refers two or three times to 'The Time Machine' in his essay On Fairy-stories, but that Tolkien disliked with some vehemence the 'scientism' that he found in Wells.

Wells saw that the geologists had put humans in lands now under the sea 50,000 years ago - the phrase, as Tolkien might have said, has a mythic ring to it. Wells imagines a story-world (a secondary world) out of the science of his day, picturing our ancient ancestors of this utterly long ago as primitives.

Tolkien does not deny the very long story back into prehistory: Beaker People, and before them the farmers who built the long barrows, and before them the hunter gatherers of Doggerland. What he does is imagine another period even before that. His imagination is symmetrical and, in fact, born from the most ancient evidence that he perceives - that is, the hints and allusions of the oldest fragments of ancient myths of the north-west of Europe that have come down to us.

All the history of humans first walking into the west coastlands of Europe has a movement from the East. First people, then agriculture, then philosophy and lore - the light from the East, as they used to say.

Tolkien believed that when the first humans reached the western shores and encountered the shoreless sea - the Atlantic - they perceived that beyond was the Other Shore, Valinor (in his word). And he extrapolated from this an entirely imaginary 'historical epoch' (or ages of the world) in which the light was not from the East but the West.

So, from one of the letters (cannot remember which, sorry):

I am historically minded. Middle-earth is not an imaginary world. ... The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: Knowledge of ancient history wasn't that advanced when Tolkien was young. But true both Wells and Tolkien are right by the knowledge what was then available to them, and wrote realistic stories. Views on historical facts were different then too. And aye, long time was thought that the homo sapiens were coming from the east. It is digging into around in the Stone Age period, from the earliest humans to the start of civilisation. Linguistically there are several substrates upon non Indo-European tongues (though it is not really accepted academically): Paleo-European, around the start of the Holocene Epoch. All of these left influences in the later Pre- and Indo-European languages. There exists a thought that not all people came over the east, but also from south and the Vasconian languages belonged to them, where Basque is the only survivor off in Southwest Europe. What you have mentioned of the Beaker people returns in the chapter about the Neolithic. The page upon old European waters might be interesting as well. For the name Háranech I used that route to find a 'logical' name for the Northsea Valley that possibly could have existed in H5100.

Thanks for the mention of the letter, I don't mind you have forgotten. That is a very clear statement of Tolkien and tells exact how to view his tales into our modern world. An imaginary historical period.... you have to be a professor to think of that. It clears also out what I have been suspecting what he did with Middle Earth. Only barely anybody mentions this fact.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

An imaginary historical period.... you have to be a professor to think of that.

Aye. :)

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This is a topic I really don't know anything about, but thinking about the topic I have a question. What about the hobbit custom of being the gift-giver on their birthdays and not the gift-receiver? It seems to be unique to hobbits (in Middle-earth) and it makes me wonder if Tolkien was drawing inspiration from a real life culture, or time period.

Hi @Boromir88, i replied to you up above with the observation that the birthday party was composed at Christmas and is a sort of birthday and Christmas party rolled into one. I still think this is on the right lines but i actually found a textual source! This is Humpty Dumpty explaining to Alice (for links and more go see my Egg thread). Note by the by the 'I beg your pardon' line, used by Gandalf in his first conversation with Bilbo Baggins.

'They gave it me,' Humpty Dumpty continued thoughtfully as he crossed one knee over the other and clasped his hands round it, 'they gave it me — for an un-birthday present.'

'I beg your pardon?' Alice said with a puzzled air.

'I'm not offended,' said Humpty Dumpty.

'I mean, what is an un-birthday present?'

'A present given when it isn't your birthday, of course.'

Alice considered a little. 'I like birthday presents best,' she said at last.

'You don't know what you're talking about!' cried Humpty Dumpty. 'How many days are there in a year?'

'Three hundred and sixty-five,' said Alice.

'And how many birthdays have you?'

'One.'

'And if you take one from three hundred and sixty-five what remains?'

'Three hundred and sixty-four, of course.'

Humpty Dumpty looked doubtful. 'I'd rather see that done on paper,' he said.

Alice couldn't help smiling as she took out her memorandum book, and worked the sum for him:

365
1
----
364
----

Humpty Dumpty took the book and looked at it carefully. 'That seems to be done right —' he began.

'You're holding it upside down!' Alice interrupted.

'To be sure I was!' Humpty Dumpty said gaily as she turned it round for him. 'I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that seems to be done right — though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now — and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents —'

'Certainly,' said Alice.

'And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'

PS. @Kirinki, i know you started this thread to send us down some rabbit holes, and it worked. but i wanted to thank you for starting this thread, which was kind and generous. the thing is, when you really think on the first sentence of The Hobbit you do indeed get to rabbits, in particular that white one that Alice chased. But when the first edition came out the publishers made a comparison to Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland' on the blurb and Tolkien got quite indignant and told them that in every way the story was more like 'Looking Glass'. Humpty Dumpty is from 'Looking Glass' and - i am now starting to see - provides many answers to the questions i have been chasing for several years.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Also, the dates are wrong – Tolkien had definitely started writing The Hobbit before he got involved in contributing to the Wheeler report.

Whatever Rateliff believed his late dating of The Hobbit must now (after the 2018 publication of Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth) be rejected.

Despite the uncertainties involved in all these dates, I dare say that we can safely assert that Tolkien did not know about the Lydney Part excavation (at least beyond any general reports in newspapers) when he first imagined the what a hobbit was, and he had at that point not been involved in considerations of the name Nodens. The Lydney Park excavations, therefore, can be safely concluded to have not influenced the initial conceptualisation of hobbits.

Troelsfo, my apologies that it has taken a while to return to your concrete argument on this thread, which as I noted above has always been about chasing rabbits. Your argument here to the point, as it is balderdash.

First, this:

Whatever Rateliff believed his late dating of The Hobbit must now (after the 2018 publication of Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth) be rejected.

Why? Rateliff of all people has pored over both evidence and the early drafts of the story and his word is the authority unless good reason to the contrary is given. He may indeed have got the starting year wrong, but I will pay no attention to a statement such as yours unless I am given concrete reason to think so (that is, textual evidence that Rateliff himself does not engage with, which I do not see that you offer).

On the very idea that Tolkien knew nothing of Nodens before one or other of the Wheelers 'hired' him to write an etymological appendix, what planet do you think Professor Tolkien lived on? The name 'Nodens' was long known, from Roman letters scratched in the days of the temple and found on the site already before the 19th century. Professor Tolkien was invited to compose an appendix precisely because he was an expert on such ancient names of the local countryside (the Forest of Dean is not so far from Oxford and Birmingham).

The Wheelers dig was big business and big academic news; just as was Gordon Childe's recent dig at Skara Brae (discussed with Aiks, above). Both would be significant contexts for Professor Tolkien's thought in the late 1920s, even without the invitation to compose an etymological note on the name Nodens.

[Lail]

I've been remiss in tending this thread not out of lack of interest but time and energy but clearly it doesn't need tending so all is well! I'm glad to see some further rabbit holes have been explored here!

On the grading papers and the spontaneous sentence, I would revise the way you put it "later wrote more to expand on that sentence". I think what we see in the story is not so much expansion as drawing out the meaning of the sentence by very careful inspection of each word. So, for example, this hobbit lives *in* the ground, so Tolkien thinks what this means by considering other dwellings *on* the ground, or even on the *water*, as well as considering and comparing various other creatures who live underground.

I think you are probably onto something seeing as Tolkien was a linguist! Interesting parallels and distinctions between the 2 sentences introducing hobbits ("In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.") vs. Gollum ("Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum. I don't know where he came from, nor who or what he was.") especially seeing as Gollum/Smeagol's origins are related to hobbits...I don't have any other intelligent comments to add unfortunately...

but I do wonder if the splice from Carroll could have inspired the tradition of hobbits giving gifts on their birthdays rather then receiving them?

PS. @Kirinki, i know you started this thread to send us down some rabbit holes, and it worked. but i wanted to thank you for starting this thread, which was kind and generous. the thing is, when you really think on the first sentence of The Hobbit you do indeed get to rabbits, in particular that white one that Alice chased. But when the first edition came out the publishers made a comparison to Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland' on the blurb and Tolkien got quite indignant and told them that in every way the story was more like 'Looking Glass'. Humpty Dumpty is from 'Looking Glass' and - i am now starting to see - provides many answers to the questions i have been chasing for several years.

A complete accident but you're welcome! and thanks for not laughing at my rabbit questions.