The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  3 This almost certainly involves a misapprehension on Denham’s part, since in Burns’ poem ‘Tam O’Shanter’ [1791] Cutty Sark (‘short skirt/smock’) is the name of a beautiful witch so called from her revealing garments, not (as he puts it in a footnote to the 1895 list) ‘a certain class of female Boggles’; see note D31.

  4 Specifically, the lines that open Denham’s piece† come from Hamlet, Act I, Scene 1, lines 158–165. Horatio and the guards are discussing the effect of the cock’s crow on the ghost of King Hamlet, whose manifestation they have just witnessed.

  † These lines of dialogue are absent in the 1848 article, which is simply headed ‘SEASONAL INFORMATION’ (a title possibly provided by the journal’s editor) followed by the line ‘Ghosts never appear on Christmas eve!’ in quotation marks; the latter was probably Denham’s title, since it reappears in The Denham Tracts version.

  5 This would presumably be the antiquarian Captain Francis Grose, author of The Antiquities of England and Wales [six volumes, 1773–1787], Antiquities of Scotland [two volumes, 1789 & 1791], and the unfinished Antiquities of Ireland [1791].

  6 That is, seventy or eighty years before this piece’s first publication in 1848, not from the time of its collection in The Denham Tracts – that is, in the 1770s and before.

  7 Originally, in the 1848 list, fairies appeared here between ignis-fatui and brownies, before being moved to near the end of the 1895 list.

  8 Denham prints sirens here instead of R. Scot’s sylens, both in the 1848 and the 1895 lists. Some folklorists have suspected that the word should be read sylvans instead, meaning some woodland creature such as the satyrs, Pans, and fauns that precede it, but the point is debatable.

  9 The 1895 printing actually reads dwafs here, but it is clear from the 1848 reading (dwarfs) that this is a simple misprint. Note that while Denham (and Scot) use elves instead of elfs (as indeed did Tolkien’s slightly elder contemporary, Lord Dunsany), neither used the purely Tolkienesque dwarves.

  10 Originally, in the 1848 list, thrummy-caps appeared here between sprets and spunks, before being moved to near the end of the 1895 list.

  11 tod-lowries: In his 1848 piece, Denham glosses this as ‘Phantom foxes’, one of only two footnotes to the original article and the only one not picked up and repeated in the final piece.

  12 Originally, in the 1848 list, cutties appeared here between brags and wraiths, before being moved to the penultimate position in the 1895 list.

  13 A simpler version of this footnote appears in the 1848 article: ‘There is a village of this name near Chester-le-street, in the county of Durham.’

  14 Denham’s note actually reads ‘12, 13, 21, 23, 27. The same with note 8.’ (e.g., D8). That is, he interprets these six as different names for the same concept. I have repeated the text of Denham’s note (D8) at each occurrence for the sake of clarity.

  15 That is, the Jacobite Uprising of 1715; the said earl was executed for treason in 1716 for his role in supporting the Old Pretender (James Stuart, son of the deposed James II).

  16 While Denham himself accepted the theory that ‘hob-thrush’ is a contraction of ‘hob-o’-t’-hurst’ (i.e., hob in the woods – see noteD7), Briggs follows Gillian Edwards in suggesting that ‘hobthrust’ derives instead from hob-thyrs, thyrs being one of the Old English words for giant† (A Dictionary of Fairies, page 223); thurse (thurses) itself appears elsewhere in Denham’s list. Since as Tolkien notes hob- is a diminutive (see page 862), the name essentially means ‘little giant’.

  † along with the more familiar (to the ears of Tolkien’s readers, at any rate) eoten.

  17 A secondary possibility is that the word was drawn to his attention by one of his many correspondents (one of whom was Dr. Hardy, the editor more than thirty years after Denham’s death of The Denham Tracts themselves – see the Preface to Volume I page viii). If this is the case, the name may have come from somewhat further afield, either the northern Midlands or just over the border in southern Scotland (e.g., Berwickshire), both areas being similarly well-provided with hob legends.

  18 Gilliver, Marshall, & Weiner give the title page for the 1851 tract:

  To all and singular the Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Phantasms, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, These brief Pages are Fearlessly Inscribed, In utter defiance of their Power and Influence, By their verie hvmble Seruaunte, To Com’aund, M:A:D.

  —The Ring of Words, page 147.

  This is almost certainly the same tract given in a listing of Denham’s works drawn up by Denham himself just before his death. The listing, published as the first item (‘A List of Antiquarian Tomes, Tracts and Trifles’) in an 1858 collection of Denham’s work titled Denham Tracts, or a few Pictures of the Olden Time in connection with The North of England [1858; facsimile reprint 1974], gives as the first item of section XI (‘Sundry Minor Tracts, &c.’) a piece titled ‘Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Phantasms’, stating that the first edition of fifty copies was printed in 1852 and ran six pages long; the second item in the same list is the second edition of the same title (eight pages, 1853). The listing may be found on page 7 of the 1858 Denham Tracts, which unfortunately does not include that tract among its 142 pages.

  19 For Tolkien’s attempt to get this book by his friend published by Allen & Unwin in 1936, see Note 23 to the commentary following Chapter IV, page 152. In the event, it was not published until 1964, the year following Lewis’s death.

  20 For more on Tolkien’s admiration for, and usage of, Wright’s book, see the commentary on Wright as a source for ‘the carrock’, pages 202–203.

  21 Other creatures from Denham’s list appearing in Tolkien’s other works include wraithes (wraiths), corpse-candles, gnomes, fairies, fays, and korigans (as the Corrigan in ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’).

  22 See Letters p. 410. Tolkien’s probable source for this information† was John Rhys’s Celtic Britain [1884], page 270.†† Modern scholarship has concluded that the so-called ‘Ivernian’ language, like the similarly once-mysterious Pictish, was in fact simply an earlier form of Celtic.

  † First uncovered by Carl Hostetter and Pat Wynne in their article ‘Stone Towers’ (Mythlore #74, Autumn 1993), page 48.

  †† The other ‘Ivernian’ word to which Tolkien refers in his letter that he had forgotten was fern, meaning (according to Rhys) ‘anything good’. Rhys also thought he detected Ivernian words underlying proper and place names such as Bolg (pages 268, 281) and Nét/Nuada/Nodens (page 263).

  I have since learned of a still earlier appearance of Denham’s list, in his little book bearing the rather unwieldy title A Collection of Proverbs and Popular Sayings Relating to the Seasons, the Weather, and Agricultural Pursuits; Gathered Chiefly from Oral Tradition [Percy Society, 1846]. The longest section (pages 23–68 out of a slim volume of only 79 pages, including frontmatter) is devoted to sayings organized by month; our now-familiar list appears (sans hobbit) as a long footnote in the December section, pegged to the saying ‘Ghosts never appear on Christmas-eve’ (which appears between ‘Christmas comes but once a year’ and ‘Busy as an oven at Christmas’). I here give Denham’s note in its entirety; italicization, spelling (e.g., ‘Shakspeare’), and the like are as in the original:

  ‡So says Shakspeare; and the truth thereof few, now-a-days, will call into question. Grose observes, too, that those born on Christmas-day cannot see spirits.

  What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on this day; when the whole world was so over-run with ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis-fatui, fairies, brownies, bug-bears, black-dogs, spectres, spelly-coats,* scare-crows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, break-necks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbys, hobthrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mumpokers, jemmy-burties, and apparitions, that there was not a village in England that had not its peculiar ghost! Nay, every lone tenemen
t or mansion which could boast of any antiquity, had its boggle or spectre. The church-yards were all haunted. Every green lane had its boulder-stone, on which an apparition kept watch by night; every common had a circle of fairies belonging to it; and there was scarce a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit!

  * These were Scotch boggles: they wore garments of shells, which made a horrid rattling when they appeared abroad. [Denham’s Note]

  Denham states in his Preface that his work of collection began ‘as far back as the year 1825’ (p. i) and was done ‘chiefly orally’ (ibid.); this might account for his later recording the word hobbit, for which no prior written source has yet been found before Denham’s own 1853 publication.

  Appendix II Tolkien’S Letter to the Observer(The Hobyahs)

  1 According to Tolkien’s disclaimer to Unwin on 4th March 1938 (Letters p. 34), he had written ‘a short and fairly sane reply for publication’ and sent it in with ‘this jesting reply’, the latter accompanied by a stamped envelope to forward its contents to ‘Habit’. The contents of the now-lost shorter version are not known, but presumably it would have covered much the same points in less detailed form (and in less entertainingly playful language).

  Tolkien’s letter to The Observer is reproduced in Letters pp. 30–32, but I reproduce it here as it appeared on page 9 of the original newspaper.

  2 ‘accidental homophones . . . [and] not . . . synonyms’: That is, having the same sound but not the same meaning and sharing no common origin, such as weak (which derives from the Old Norse veikr) and week (which derives from Old English wicu).

  3 I.e., quende, noldo, orc, and naug, respectively.

  4 This passing reference enables us to date Bilbo’s contract, reproduced for the first time as plate two of the Frontispiece to this volume, as already having been in existence by mid-January 1938.

  5 Etymology: that is, research into the origin of a word, tracing it as far back to its original source(s) as possible. At issue is whether Tolkien’s claim to have invented the word is accepted by the OED, although apparently it was questioned by no one except Tolkien himself, solely on the basis of the ‘Habit’ letter thirty-two years before.

  6 Slightly different excerpts from this letter appear in both Letters pp. 404–405 and Gilliver et al.’s The Ring of Words pages 143–144; the first paragraph given here appears only in Letters and the final paragraph only in The Ring of Words. The latter goes on to give the OED entry as it was actually published in 1976:

  In the tales of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973): one of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race, that gave themselves this name (meaning ‘hole-dweller’) but were called by others halflings, since they were half the height of normal men.

  7 Tolkien is obviously writing from memory here without the original clipping in front of him, since ‘Habit’ had in fact specified a somewhat earlier date (i.e., circa 1904).

  8 The story ‘Puss-Cat Mew’ can most readily be found in Douglas A. Anderson’s collection Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy [2003], pages 46–86. It is unfortunate, given Tolkien’s early fondness for the tale, that Knatchbull-Hugessen did not inherit any of the writing talent of his illustrious great-aunt. Instead, Stories for My Children in general and ‘Puss-Cat Mew’ in particular exhibit all the characteristics in children’s stories that Tolkien came to loathe: a facetious narrator, smug moralizing, jarring anachronisms, and prettified fairies that would have been right at home in ‘Tinfang Warble’ or ‘Goblin Feet’. In short, Knatchbull-Hugessen’s best is more or less on par with Tolkien’s worst.

  However, as Anderson notes (Tales, page 47), it is possible to see a few parallels to scenes in The Hobbit in its narrative; examples include the hero’s fight with three dwarves in which he knocks out the tooth of one and bashes the second in the face, only to be struck down by the third (compare Thorin’s fight with the three trolls, in which he knocks out Tom’s fang, pokes Bert in the eye, and is then nabbed by William), the hero’s acquisition of a glove of invisibility (which he uses to assassinate his various foes, just like the ‘practical’ burglars of whom Bilbo has heard tell – see page 92), or the hero’s sitting down and turning out his pockets for crumbs when lost in the forest after escaping a deadly foe. But none of the parallels is particularly compelling, and all could be the result of simple coincidence. More interesting is that Knatchbull-Hugessen starts with a bit of nursery rhyme:

  Puss-cat Mew jumped over a coal;

  In her best petticoat burnt a great hole;

  Puss-cat Mew shan’t have any milk

  Till her best petticoat’s mended with silk.†

  and writes his story to explain the events behind it, a very Tolkienesque enterprise.

  Far more important, although not of relevance for The Hobbit, is that ‘Puss-Cat Mew’ marks the first time we know of that Tolkien was exposed to what became one of the signature motifs in his legendarium: the winning of a faerie bride by a worthy mortal (the titular cat of Knatchbull-Hugessen’s story is in fact a fairy under an enchantment). This theme appears over and over again in Tolkien’s work, from the story of Beren and Lúthien to that of Aragorn and Arwen, from Tuor and Idril or the story of Mithrellas of Lórien and Imrazôr the Númenórean (UT.248) to the nameless temptress of ‘Ides Ælfscyýne’ and her equally nameless victim.

  † Baring-Gould gives a somewhat different version of this same poem, which he derives from the work of James O. Halliwell (i.e., either one of the editions of The Nursery Rhymes of England [1842ff] or Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales [1849]):

  Pussy cat Mole jumped over a coal

  And in her best petticoat burnt a great hole

  Poor Pussy’s weeping, she’ll have no more milk

  Until her best petticoat’s mended with silk.

  —The Annotated Mother Goose [1962],

  page 171; rhyme #300

  9 This identification was made as far back as 1988 in the first edition of Douglas Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit (page 5); more information appears in the revised edition (DAA.9).

  10 Reprinted in Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales [1894], tale number LXIX, pages [118]–124, plus notes page 232. Despite Jacobs’ carelessness – he gets both the name of the journal (‘American Folk-Lore Journal’) and the volume (‘iii’) in which the story appeared wrong – he reproduced the tale itself word-for-word as it had appeared in Proudfit’s version, aside from a few minor changes in punctuation (some inadvertent).

  Proudfit himself, in addition to his splendidly hobbit-like name, was a distinguished archeologist and anthropologist, with a special interest in the preColumbian settlements in the Washington DC area. A career bureaucrat, he seems to have drafted the first version of what later became the Antiquities Act when a lawyer working for the McKinley administration [1899] and later as Acting Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs under Taft intervened decisively to preserve Navaho sites in the Southwest [1909].

  Briggs observes (A Dictionary of Fairies page 223) that although derived from Scots immigrants, the story as told by Proudfit and Jacobs retains no trace of Scots dialect.

  Appendix III The Dvergatal (The Dwarf Names)

  1 Cf., for example, Vigfusson & Powell’s Corpus Poeticvm Boreale [1883] Vol. I pages 192 (‘The Mnemonic Verses . . . relating to the Dwarves . . . have been removed as most certainly extraneous, though they had crept even into Snorri’s text’) and 79, and Dronke The Poetic Edda, Volume II: Mythological Poems [1997] pages 38, 92, 122, and especially 67.

  2 The three volumes published so far of Dronke’s edition – Volume I: Heroic Poems [1969], Volume II: Mythological Poems [1997], and Volume III: Mythological Poems II [2011] – cover only thirteen out of the collection’s twenty-nine component poems. The remaining volumes are to cover the Helgi lays and the Sigurd cycle† and the remaining mythological and miscellaneous pieces.

  † That is, the portions rewritten by Tolkien as Volsungakvida En Nyja; cf. Letters p. 452.

  3
These four dwarf-names are missing in the Codex Regius [circa 1270], the best manuscript of the Völuspá, but they are present in most other manuscripts of the Dvergatal, including the Hauksbók [circa 1302–1310, though this material was added circa 1330–1350]; see Dronke, textual notes, page 90, and her notes on the manuscripts, page 61.

  4 Dronke reads these as two names, as per the Codex Regius (Hepti, Vili) and Hauksbók (Hefti, Fili); all other manuscripts of the Dvergatal give them as a single name (Heptifili); see Dronke, textual notes, page 91.

  5 These four names, absent from the Codex Regius, appear in the Hauksbók; see Dronke, textual notes, page 91. Burin, a variant of the fourth name given in one manuscript of Snorri’s version (as ‘Bvrin’), would later appear in early drafts of The Lord of the Rings as the son of Balin, who comes to Rivendell searching for news of his father and thus attends the Council of Elrond; he was later replaced by Gimli son of Gloin (HME VI.395, 397, 400) as the dwarven member of the Fellowship.

  6 These four names appear in neither the Codex Regius nor the Hauksbók versions of the Völuspá, but only in manuscripts of Snorri’s version of the Dvergatal (from Gylfaginning). In one important manuscript of that work, Ori does not appear here but higher up in the list, immediately following Bömburr and Nori in stanza 11, where it replaces the name Án. Similarly, in two manuscripts of Snorri’s version Ái (cf. the last line of stanza 11) is replaced by Oin. See Dronke, textual notes, pages 92 and 90.

  7 With the possible exception of Balin, unless we accept this as Tolkien’s own variant, unattested in the manuscript tradition, of Blain, as I have suggested on page 24.