Hobbit - Development

Development

Tolkien believed he had invented the word "hobbit" when he began writing The Hobbit (it was revealed years after his death that the word predated Tolkien's usage, though with a different meaning). Tolkien's concept of hobbits, in turn, seems to have been inspired by Edward Wyke Smith's 1927 children's book The Marvellous Land of Snergs, and by Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel Babbitt. The Snergs were, in Tolkien's words, "a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and have the strength of ten men." Tolkien wrote to W. H. Auden that The Marvellous Land of Snergs "was probably an unconscious source-book for the Hobbits" and he told an interviewer that the word hobbit "might have been associated with Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt" (like hobbits, George Babbitt enjoys the comforts of his home). However, Tolkien claims that he started The Hobbit suddenly, without premeditation, in the midst of rating a set of student essay exams, writing on a blank piece of paper: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit". While The Hobbit introduced this comfortable race to the world, it is only in writing The Lord of the Rings that Tolkien developed details of their history and wider society.

He set out a fictional etymology for the name in an appendix to Lord of the Rings, to the effect that it was derived from holbytla (plural holbytlan), a speculative reconstruction of Old English, meaning “hole-builder” (in the books, Old English stands in for words in the language of the fictional Rohirrim).