This engrossing list of names for supernatural beings encountered in the British Isles takes some beating. See if you can spot why I chose this thread to host it:
(Reproduced long list snipped)
Was alphabetical order not a thing in the 19th century? Also, is it just me, or does "death-hearse" sound a bit tautological? Anyway, the list is credited to the Denham Tracts, 1892-95, as reprinted in The Penguin Book of English Folk-Tales, Neil Philip, 1992. Tip of the hat to
Yetibaba, t/a The Mercurial Muse.
"Coming in late" here (having just logged onto "Earth Mysteries" for the first time in many months): memory has been called up, of an exchange a few years ago on a Harry Potter fans' message board (J.K. Rowling makes use of, and fits various paranormal beings to, a good many old British terms for such entities, including some on the wonderful Denham Tracts list included in
Krepostnoi's post). The list's including "hobbits" (line 27), was mentioned there.
Discussion then and there, touched on the word "hobbit" being widely attributed / self-attributed to a coining by Tolkien; when in fact the Denham Tracts knew it in the 1890s. IIRC happenings recounted by Tolkien were, that one day in the 1930s he was marking examination papers handed in, when there popped into his head from nowhere, the words "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit". (Whence, in later years, Bilbo Baggins and all that came after.)
In this reminiscence, Tolkien would seem to imply that he -- or his subconscious, quite randomly -- thus invented the word "hobbit" for the first time: which is, as above, demonstrably not so. I like old J.R.R., and would wish to think of him as a highly moral chap -- devout Catholic and all that: so prefer to believe that either he genuinely did happen on the word independently, out of the blue, never having encountered it before; or that -- maybe decades earlier, as an undergraduate -- he had come across the Denham Tracts list, but did not remember every single thing that it contained (who could?) -- with "hobbit(s)" lurking in an untapped memory cell, until randomly emerging all those years later. At all events, I don't wish to think that he -- consciously -- nicked the word from the D.T., and then passed it off as "his own invention".
