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- Jul 27, 2001
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Hallo everyone, I'm back again!
JRR Tolkein was a very fastidious fella, some may say unkindly a little bit sad, and had a complex etymology of every name of a person or place in the Middle Earth sagas. Every name means something in some language or another, much like in the real world.
The word "Hobbit" does not fit so well into this. The whole saga was inspired by Tolkein, as a teacher, jotting down the words "'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" for no apparent reason, as if from nowhere.
He eventually fitted it into his grand scheme of things by deciding it came from Old English "hol byldan", roughly 'to build a hole'. However he truly never knew where he got it from, and if it was some cryptic memory he had.
In 1938 someone wrote to the Observer, saying they remembered a fairy tale called 'The Hobbit' from at least 1904. And the online Tolkein resource The Encylopedia of Arda (from which I got all this info) states:
So is this a coincidence, a case of cryptamnesia from a fairy tail Tolkein heard of and forgot, or some long forgotten supernatural being tunneling its ways into the mind of a bored author?
Source: http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/h/hobbits.html
JRR Tolkein was a very fastidious fella, some may say unkindly a little bit sad, and had a complex etymology of every name of a person or place in the Middle Earth sagas. Every name means something in some language or another, much like in the real world.
The word "Hobbit" does not fit so well into this. The whole saga was inspired by Tolkein, as a teacher, jotting down the words "'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" for no apparent reason, as if from nowhere.
He eventually fitted it into his grand scheme of things by deciding it came from Old English "hol byldan", roughly 'to build a hole'. However he truly never knew where he got it from, and if it was some cryptic memory he had.
In 1938 someone wrote to the Observer, saying they remembered a fairy tale called 'The Hobbit' from at least 1904. And the online Tolkein resource The Encylopedia of Arda (from which I got all this info) states:
Since this article was written, we've discovered that the name 'hobbit' goes back far further than even Tolkien suspected. We're indebted to Mark Blanton for sending along a long list of magical beings collected by a certain Michael Aislabie Denham before the year 1859. In the middle of this list, among the 'boggleboes', 'freiths' and 'wirrikows' lies the term 'hobbits'. Even more remarkably, the list predates even the nineteenth century - it was apparently taken from an even earlier work, Discovery of Witchcraft, dated 1584.
So is this a coincidence, a case of cryptamnesia from a fairy tail Tolkein heard of and forgot, or some long forgotten supernatural being tunneling its ways into the mind of a bored author?
Source: http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/h/hobbits.html