![]() ![]() Clearly Fatty Bolger's weakness is eating, and Odo Proudfoot could stand for hiking and country walks. Merry Brandybuck suggests an enthusiast for fine wines and spirits Pippin Took suggests pipe and tobacco 1 and certainly Pippin has a fondness for his pipe, despite being still considered a child by the other hobbits. He even gave his hobbits names showing which habit/hobby they represent. Some resonance with the words 'habit' and 'hobby' is inescapable, however, and Tolkien tacitly confirms this by making the hobbits to some extent personifications of the habits and hobbies of a British gentleman. Tolkien invented the word 'hobbit' out of the blue and later disowned any intention of making it stand for something specific. The story in it is seen from the viewpoint of the hobbits but it concerns all the free people of the world. ![]() This led to the writing of the much more elaborate The Lord of the Rings. Suddenly hobbits became very popular and the publisher was back demanding more stories. Then he decided to publish one of them in book form, as The Hobbit, using the sentence that had come into his mind as the first line of the book. Tolkien was busy one day marking student exercises and a sentence sprang fully formed into his mind: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' He didn't know what a hobbit was, but developed the idea, imagining it to be a small person and started to tell stories to his children about hobbits. There is no evidence that Tolkien ever saw this list, but it is possible that he did. Occurring beside 'hobgoblin', the 'hob' part of the name probably comes from the same source, a name for the devil. The word 'hobbit' occurs once in a long list of magical creatures of England made by Michael Aislabie Denham in the 19th Century. Tolkien imagined that hobbits might once have been common and now are very scarce. The folklore of the British Isles frequently mentions little magical people, such as the leprechauns of Ireland or the gnomes of England. Tolkien considered his Middle-earth to be a folkloric description of our own world long ago. As a result of their great longevity, they are slower to develop and are not considered adults until they are 33. (Bilbo himself reached this age, but that was probably due to the influence of his magic ring). They regularly reach 100 years old, and at least one, the Old Took, reached 130. Both Saruman and Gandalf are enthusiastic pipe smokers. The dwarves and the wizards learnt smoking from the hobbits.
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