It is possible that Tolkien read The Denham Tracts, picked up the word ‘hobbit’, and then forgot all about it till the moment of the blank exam script, but whatever the Times may say, the single-word appearance can hardly be called his source, still less his ‘inspiration’. Philologists love words, true, but they also know what they are: the word is not the thing.
Not on its own, anyway, for we should remember that Tolkien was keenly interested in words, and names, and their origins, and knew more about some kinds of them than anyone alive (see further pp. 57-9 and 82-6 below). This thought leads to an only slightly more productive theory about hobbits, which is that they sound rather like and therefore might have something to do with rabbits. Shortly after The Hobbit came out, on 16th January 1938, the Observer printed a letter from an unknown correspondent suggesting some evidently unconvincing connections between hobbits and other real or rumoured furry creatures. Tolkien replied to the correspondent (he did not mean the Observer to print his letter, but they did), good-humouredly denying the suggestions, and rejecting both furriness and rabbits:
my hobbit…was not furry, except about the feet. Nor indeed was he like a rabbit…Calling him ‘a nassty little rabbit’ was a piece of vulgar trollery, just as ‘descendant of rats’ was a piece of dwarfish malice.
(Letters, p. 30)
One has to say, however, that it was not just the trolls. The eagle carrying Bilbo in chapter 7 tells him, ‘You need not be frightened like a rabbit, even if you look rather like one’. In the previous chapter Bilbo had himself started ‘to think of being torn up for supper like a rabbit’, and at the end of his stay in Beorn’s house Beorn picks him up, pokes his waistcoat disrespectfully, and remarks, ‘Little bunny is getting nice and fat again on bread and honey’. Thorin shakes him ‘like a rabbit’ in chapter 17. The opinion that hobbits are like rabbits is, it seems, pretty widespread among those who meet them. Just the same one can see why Tolkien so firmly rejected the connection. He did not want hobbits, and Bilbo in particular, to be equated with bunnies, or even coneys (another word for ‘rabbits’ which Bilbo uses): small, fluffy, harmless, irretrievably childish, never rising above the status of pet. The word ‘rabbit’ was probably professionally interesting to Tolkien, and may have had something to do with the relationship between hobbits and the other races of Middle-earth, for reasons to be explained later on. But whatever else might be said about them, hobbits had to be allowed to be people: not spirits, not animals, but people.
What kind of person? Here one can learn a lot, as might be expected, from the very careful and unexpectedly suggestive presentation of Bilbo right at the start of The Hobbit begins, indeed, with the famous sentence of inspiration, the sentence from the subconscious: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ But we are immediately told that this, on its own, would be totally misleading. Creatures that live in holes in the ground ought to be animals – rabbits, moles, snakes, gophers, badgers – and ‘hole’ conveys a poor impression as a place to live. ‘Don’t call my palace a nasty hole!’ says Thorin much later, in chapter 13. ‘You wait till it has been cleaned and redecorated!’ Bilbo’s hole, however, needs neither cleaning nor redecorating, for the description goes on, firmly and rhythmically negating all the suggestions of the sentence before it:
Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
It is in fact, in everything except being underground (and in there being no servants), the home of a member of the Victorian upper-middle class of Tolkien’s nineteenth-century youth, full of studies, parlours, cellars, pantries, wardrobes, and all the rest.
Bilbo himself is furthermore fairly easy to place both socially and even chronologically. If one did not have the rest of the book to go on, one would have to place him, on internal evidence, from a time after the discovery of America, for he smokes a pipe, and indeed the last words of the whole book are ‘tobacco-jar’ (‘tobacco’ is not recorded in English by the OED till 1588). But one could be more precise than that, for when Bilbo wishes to discourage Gandalf he takes out ‘his morning letters’, which are clearly routinely delivered early every day. Bilbo must live, then, after the introduction of a postal service – our familiar system dates, in England, from 1837. In a more indirect way Bilbo might also be thought to date from a time after railway-engines, for though it is the narrator’s term not his own, when his nerve finally breaks he shrieks ‘like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel’ (the first freight-and-passenger steam railway in England opened in 1825, the first railway tunnel dating from five years later).
All this of course turns out to be completely wrong, and we are told point-blank that the story is set ‘long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green’. Tolkien, however, did not forget any of the points raised above, and would later go to some lengths to explain them away, or blur them. But the fact is that hobbits are, and always remain, highly anachronistic in the ancient world of Middle-earth. That indeed is their main function, for one might note that by their anachronism they engage a problem faced and solved in not dissimilar ways by several writers of historical novels. In setting a work in some distant time, an author may well find that the gap between that time and the reader’s modern awareness is too wide to be easily bridged; and accordingly a figure essentially modern in attitudes and sentiment is imported into the historical world, to guide the reader’s reactions, to help the reader feel ‘what it would be like’ to be there. An obvious example comes from the Hornblower novels of C.S. Forester, which began to be published at exactly the same time as The Hobbit. In them, as all readers of them will remember, the hard-headed and hard-hearted Bush stands for Nelsonian normality, firmly contrasted with the more intelligent, more squeamish, and much more twentieth-century figure of Hornblower, with his horror of flogging, belief in cold showers and cleanliness, and dangerously democratic notions. Bilbo, even more than his successor-hobbits from The Lord of the Rings, takes up this role as ‘reflector’. His failings are those which the child reader, and indeed the adult reader, would have if transported magically to Middle-earth. He is ‘used to having [his meat] delivered by the butcher all ready to cook’, has no idea how to ‘hoot twice like a barn-owl and once like a screech-owl’, and has to cover up his inability to understand anything of bird language, whether ‘quick and difficult’ or not. He is a modern person, or at least a twentieth-century person, who seems again and again to be out of place in the archaic and heroic world into which he is drawn, or thrust, by Gandalf.
On the other hand, Bilbo is solidly placed in hobbit society, which requires no explanation at all (at least for the reader of 1937). Once his ‘hole’ has been dealt with, and any incorrect suggestions the word may have created have been explained away, the first thing we are told about Bilbo is his social standing: and this is unusually precise. Thus Bilbo is ‘well-to-do’, but not necessarily ‘rich’; most of his paternal relations are rich, but not as rich as his maternal ones. The OED, here an excellent guide, as to most Victorian or Edwardian usage, defines ‘well-to-do’ as ‘Possessed of a competency; in easy circumstances’, by which it means above all, not having to work. ‘Rich’ by contrast has several meanings, being an old word, but the relevant one is ‘Having large possessions or abundant means’ – abundant as opposed to competent. Bilbo then has enough and a bit over, but not more than that. What he and his family do have without qualification, however, is ‘respectability’, which in English society had and still has no correlation whatever with wealth. It is perfectly possible, indeed normal, to be a respectable member of the working classes, and just as normal to be a member of the upper classes with no respectability whatsoever. The OED defines ‘respectable’ carefully as ‘Of good or fair social standing, and having the moral qualities naturally appropriate to this’: note the words ‘or fair’, with which Tolkien would have agreed (there is no doubt later on that the Gamgee family is respectable, and capable of major social mobility, but without even a ‘competency’ to start with);