The Origin of Hobbits

SECTION: Why Hobbits Aren't in the Old Lists

The Elves wake into the world at Cuiviénen, beside the water, under the stars, before the Sun or the Moon have even been made. The first thing they ever see is starlight on a lake. Men wake much later and much further east, at Hildórien, on the morning the Sun first rises. The Dwarves are made in secret beneath the Misty Mountains by Aulë the Smith, who couldn't wait for the Children of Ilúvatar and made his own. When Ilúvatar catches him at it and Aulë lifts the hammer to destroy the work himself, the seven little figures shrink away from the blow. That flinch is why they live. The Ents exist because Yavanna went to Manwë, told him her trees couldn't run, and asked for someone to guard them.

Four types of people. Four different scenes. And in every case we are told where they were standing on their first day in Tolkien's world.

Hobbits have none of that.

No awakening. No Vala who made them or spoke for them. No place in the story of how the world was sung into being. There's a version of this that circulates but it feels slightly wrong. The real story is better.

People will say hobbits are never mentioned in The Silmarillion. That's not entirely true. The word "hobbit" never appears in that book's story - not once, not in the creation account, not in any of the chapters of the main history. But hobbits themselves do appear four times, all of them in the final chapter, and three of those four times they appear under somebody else's word for them. Periannath. The Halflings. Names given by Elves and by Men, in languages hobbits didn't speak.

The first time they are mentioned the text doesn't even name them as a people. It says the Ring was found by "one of the small fisher-folk that dwelt by the River."

That's Sméagol.

That's might be the most important act in three ages of the world, and the book that holds the entire architecture of creation files it under "fisher-folk".

Tolkien gives a little more context in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings.

"The beginning of Hobbits lies far back in the Elder Days that are now lost and forgotten. Only the Elves still preserve any records of that vanished time, and their traditions are concerned almost entirely with their own history, in which Men appear seldom and Hobbits are not mentioned at all."

Weirdly enough, the Elves wrote everything down. They just didn't write down hobbits.

The dated chronology says the same thing by staying quiet. The Second Age runs three thousand four hundred and forty-one years - Númenor rises and drowns, the Rings of Power are forged, the Last Alliance marches on the Black Gate - without one mention of hobbits. The first dated line anywhere that mentions them is the year 1050 of the Third Age.

So the beginning of the hobbit story is empty. And maybe they have nobody to blame but themselves. Because hobbits are, as we learn, terrible witnesses to their own past.

The Prologue is pretty blunt about it. Tolkien writes about the Rangers who walked the Shire's borders for centuries, and says that hobbits "forgot or ignored what little they had ever known of the Guardians, and of the labours of those that made possible the long peace of the Shire. They were, in fact, sheltered, but they had ceased to remember it."

They couldn't hold on to a rescue that was happening around them at the time.

And there's a detail at the back of the book that's almost funny. Bilbo spent fifteen years in Rivendell translating Elvish material into three bound volumes, working from everything in Elrond's house. Three volumes of the Elder Days, in a language hobbits could read, sitting in the Shire. The note on the Shire's books waves the whole thing away in a line: they were "little used by Frodo, being almost entirely concerned with the Elder Days."

Hobbits had the whole library sitting on their shelf, and never bothered to open it.

SECTION: TA 1050: The First Hobbit in the Record

So let's start at the beginning we know.

The Tale of Years, the year 1050 of the Third Age, says this. "About this time a shadow falls on Greenwood, and men begin to call it Mirkwood. The Periannath are first mentioned in records, with the coming of the Harfoots to Eriador."

One entry. Two facts. A forest goes dark in the east, hobbits enter written history in the west, and he puts them on the same line without comment. Hobbit history begins the way refugee history begins. With a shadow, and a move.

Fifty years later, around the year 1100, the Wise discover that an evil power has made a stronghold at Dol Guldur. That's Gandalf, Saruman, Galadriel, Elrond. The most perceptive council in Middle-earth works out that Sauron has come back to the forest fifty years after a few thousand small farmers packed up and walked over a mountain range to get away from it.

Tolkien says confirms this in a late essay Christopher published after his death. "Plainly the Hobbits had sensed, even before the Wizards and the Eldar had become fully aware of it, the awakening of Sauron and his occupation of Dol Guldur."

The hobbits felt it first, without any idea what they were feeling or any way to write it down. They knew something was off.

This pattern repeats. Around the year 1300, another single entry: "The Nazgûl reappear. The chief of these comes north to Angmar. The Periannath migrate westward; many settle at Bree."

The Witch-king arrives in the north and hobbits move west, in the same sentence, again with no comment.

Every hobbit date so far is somebody else's disaster, seen from underneath.

Then, five hundred and fifty years after the first entry, the migration finally produces something with a name and a founding. In the year 1601 of the Third Age, two Fallohide brothers, Marcho and Blanco, set out from Bree, get permission from the king at Fornost, cross the brown river Baranduin over a bridge Men had built, and take all the land beyond it.

The terms of that grant are the terms of a lease. The hobbits owed the king three things. Keep the Great Bridge in repair, and maintain all the other bridges and roads. Help the king's messengers along. And acknowledge his lordship.

And that's the founding of the Shire.

Hobbit self-rule starts as a favour from a Man's kingdom that is already dying, and it never stops being that. Nearly fifteen hundred years later, Aragorn is the one who grants the hobbits the Westmarch. Every border the Shire ever has is drawn by somebody bigger.

And that year is where Tolkien draws his own line. "About this time," he writes, "legend among the Hobbits first becomes history with a reckoning of years."

Tolkien is telling us that everything before that date is just a legend. The blank page ends here and somebody has finally started counting.

They were counting from farmland that already had furrows in it. The land had "long been deserted when they entered it," he says, but it had "before been well tilled," and the king had once had farms and cornlands and vineyards there. The Shire is a dead kingdom's countryside, re-occupied by refugees. Thirty-five years later the Great Plague emptied Eriador around them: "Beyond the Baranduin the Periannath survive, but suffer great loss."

Once hobbits can write, the first thing they do with that ability is to argue. In the year 1975 the last battle against Angmar was fought at Fornost, and the Shire maintained ever after that it sent bowmen to help the king. Tolkien reports the claim, then adds seven words that undo it: "though no tales of Men record it." Two archives, one battle, no agreement, and Tolkien leaves it. Meanwhile the hobbits of Bree insisted they were the oldest hobbit settlement in the world, and referred to the Shire-folk, permanently, as colonists.

Two hobbit populations, forty miles apart, arguing about who got there first. This between people that can't even say where any of them came from.

SECTION: Harfoots, Stoors, and Fallohides

There's one sentence in the Prologue that complicates an origin story more than anything else in it.

"Before the crossing of the mountains the Hobbits had already become divided into three somewhat different breeds: Harfoots, Stoors, and Fallohides."

"Before."

So they arrived in Eriador already split, in three kinds, with different builds, different landscapes they liked, and different neighbors. Whatever divine miracle yields three kinds of hobbit happened east of the Misty Mountains, in a part nobody wrote down. The only description we get of them starts after the interesting part is over.

The Harfoots were "browner of skin, smaller, and shorter, and they were beardless and bootless," with a preference for highlands and hillsides. They had "much to do with Dwarves in ancient times." They were by far the most numerous, the most likely to settle in one place and stay, and the ones who "longest preserved their ancestral habit of living in tunnels and holes." They also moved first and fastest: the Prologue has Harfoots roaming Eriador as far east as Weathertop while the other two hobbit kinds were still back in the Wilderland.

The Stoors were the opposite of all that. Broader, heavier, bigger hands and feet, and a preference for flat country and riversides. They were "less shy of Men" than the others. And they break a rule Tolkien lays out a few pages earlier: "Most Hobbits regarded even rivers and small boats with deep misgivings, and not many of them could swim." The Stoors swam. The Stoors made boats out of reeds. So one kind of hobbit likes the water. And that foreshadows a part of the story many of us already know.

Stoors were still around in the Shire in Frodo's lifetime. You just have to know where to look. The hobbits of the Eastfarthing were big and heavy-legged, they wore dwarf-boots, and a lot of them grew facial hair. That's a tip-off because Tolkien says that "no Harfoot or Fallohide had any trace of a beard." A bearded hobbit in a pair of boots is a Stoor. Almost fourteen centuries after the Stoors migrated up from Dunland. And the Shire's farmhouses and barns, as opposed to its holes, are said to have been started by Stoor blood.

The Fallohides were the least numerous of the hobbits and the strangest. Taller, slimmer, fairer. They were friendlier with Elves than any of the other hobbits. They were better at language and song but not so great at handicrafts. They liked hunting more than farming. They crossed the mountains north of Rivendell, came down the river Hoarwell, and mixed straight into the populations that had got there first. Tolkien also tells us they were "somewhat bolder and more adventurous," and so "were often found as leaders or chieftains among clans of Harfoots or Stoors."

Smallest in number but suppliers of leadership. Tolkien names the two families where you could still see Fallohides in Bilbo's day: the Tooks, and the Masters of Buckland.

This makes Buckland a model of the whole thing: a Fallohide line leading a population that's a large part Stoor, centuries after the pattern was set.

Tolkien wrote down a cause for the state of the hobbits in an appendix in Unfinished Tales about Númenórean measurements. The dwindling of hobbits, he says, "must be due to a change in their state and way of life." They became "a fugitive and secret people," pushed off the good land as Men multiplied and took it, driven "to refuge in forest or wilderness: a wandering and poor folk, forgetful of their arts, and fearful of being seen."

That's the closest thing to an origin story he ever wrote for them. Oddly, it describes a decline. Hobbits were made small and hidden by being pushed. And "forgetful of their arts" is the missing record. It is described as something that happened to a group of people rather than a gap in the lore.

SECTION: Where the Word Hobbit Actually Came From

So Tolkien might not have given the hobbits a creation story. But he did give them a whole made-up history for their language, and then admitted, in writing, that he'd built it backwards.

Some of this shows up in the table of contents. In the appendix on languages, the section called "Of Hobbits" sits directly after "Of Men," and before "Of Other Races," where the Ents and the Orcs and the Dwarves live. Hobbits are filed under the humans. Everyone else is filed under other.

Then we get some evidence. Hobbits have no language of their own and never did. "In ancient days," Tolkien writes, "they seem always to have used the languages of Men near whom, or among whom, they lived." The tongue they were speaking when they came over the mountains was "evidently a Mannish language of the upper Anduin, akin to that of the Rohirrim." In the unpublished draft he narrows it to the stretch of river "roughly between the Carrock and the Gladden Fields."

That's a small patch of land, and it's occupied: it's the same stretch of river Unfinished Tales gives to the Éothéod, the ancestors of the Rohirrim.

The migration made them a trade, and it's stated in one paragraph of the Prologue. "It was in these early days, doubtless, that the Hobbits learned their letters." Same paragraph: "in those days also they forgot whatever languages they had used before."

During the migration the hobbits gained writing and lost the language in the same generation. By the time hobbits could write anything on a page, they could no longer say where they'd come from.

One word survives. The old form is kûd-dûkan, hole-builder. Spoken in hobbit drawl it becomes kuduk, which is what the hobbits of the Shire and Bree actually called themselves. Truer to its original form in Rohan it becomes holbytla. And holbytla, worn down again by centuries, becomes hobbit.

Pretty elegant. Also a bit funny.

Tolkien says this word, "hobbit", "seems to have been at first a name given to the Harfoots by the Fallohides and Stoors."

So this means "hobbit" started out as what two kinds of hobbit called the third kind, the commonest kind, and then the nickname beame what we called the whole people.

They argued about it among themselves, too, in a draft appendix Christopher published rather than the finished book. "Among Hobbits there are two opinions. Some hold that originally they had a language peculiar to themselves. Others assert that from the beginning they spoke a Mannish tongue, being in fact a branch of the race of Men." Then Tolkien picks a side, and gives a motive. "The first opinion is now favoured by Hobbits, because of their growing distaste for Men... The second opinion is clearly the right one."

A people with no origin story has a nationalist party instead. And the version they love the most isn't even true.

The one outside witness is Rohan, and Rohan shows how little one leftover word actually tells us.When Théoden meets Merry and Pippin he recognises them instantly: "Are not these the Halflings, that some among us call the Holbytlan?" He tells them what that means to him. "But I will not deceive you: we know no tales about hobbits... there are no legends of their deeds."

The only outside confirmation hobbits ever get is a noun, "halflings", but it comes with no backstory, "we know no tales about hobbits.".

Tolkien probably knew exactly what he'd done. That same appendix opens its translator's note with four words: "Hobbit is an invention." In 1959, when writing about a Polish translation, Tolkien added context. "That the Hobbits actually spoke an ancient language of their own is of course a pseudo-historical assertion made necessary by the nature of the narrative."

The real question behind all that word-history, he answered straight, every time anyone asked. In a footnote to a long letter in 1951: hobbits are "a branch of the specifically human race." And in 1970, when the Oxford English Dictionary asked how to define the word, he sent them the definition himself, and they printed it almost verbatim. "One of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race."

A variety of us humans, but no Darwin to track down how they began.

SECTION: Sméagol's People: The Stoors Who Turned Back

There's one group of hobbits we get to watch who never had a Shire, never had a Thain or a mayor or a line in anyone's chronicle. And the whole Lord of the Rings comes out of them.

Their founding, in the appendix on the northern kingdoms, is fourteen words. Some Stoors, it says, "returned to Wilderland, and dwelt beside the Gladden, becoming a riverside people of fishers."

And that's all the informatio we're given about the people who found the One Ring.

A sentence fragment.

Even the date is contested, and this is one place where Tolkien's own books openly disagree with each other. The Tale of Years puts the Stoors leaving the Angle at about the year 1356 of the Third Age. The appendix on the kings ties the same movement to the Angmar wars around 1409, and adds a reason that has nothing to do with war: the land and climate of Eriador "worsened and became unfriendly." So the migration was caused by either weather or a war, half a century apart, in the same appendices. Tolkien never reconciled this.

Gandalf is the one who tells us about these hobbits, and he does it very carefully. "I guess they were of hobbit-kind; akin to the fathers of the fathers of the Stoors, for they loved the River, and often swam in it, or made little boats of reeds."

When Gandalf says "I guess", that's maybe the wisest person in the story, describing the population that produced Gollum. He's not quite sure about what he says. Tolkien defended Gandalf's hedge later: in modern speech, he said, "I guess" was modern usage for "I deduce", and that the customs of these river hobbits had to remain conjectural. Nobody has a document.

Gandalf describes a society without a single Shire institution in it. An extended family "of high repute," ruled by "a grandmother of the folk, stern and wise in old lore, such as they had."

These are hobbits whose store of knowledge had already thinned out. And a grandmother ruling the roost feels a bit odd. Tolkien wrote in a draft letter that a hobbit household was a dyarchy - master and mistress ruling it together - and that there were "no dowagers," no widow carrying on as head of the family once her husband was gone. The one hobbit matriarch in the legendarium was a Stoor, the branch of hobbits that left.

It's tempting to read the Stoors people as a window onto what hobbits were like before the Shire. That's only half right. In the same letter Tolkien says they lost contact with every other hobbit population for more than eleven hundred years. In that time the western hobbits grew settled and comfortable, and the ones who went back east went the other way, into something wilder and poorer. They're a control group that ran for sixteen centuries.

And then there's Sméagol.

Before he ever touches the Ring, he's described like this: "He was interested in roots and beginnings; he dived into deep pools; he burrowed under trees and growing plants; he tunnelled into green mounds; and he ceased to look up at the hill-tops: his head and his eyes were downward."

Sméagol is destroyed by the most hobbit thing about him. Burrowing, tunnelling and looking downward are the defining habits of his whole race. The one hobbit who goes looking for roots and beginnings is the one it ruins.

Sméagol finds the Ring in the year 2463 of the Third Age. That's four hundred and seventy-eight years before Bilbo, in the branch of hobbits nobody was writing about. And when the Nazgûl come hunting up the Anduin in 3018, they find the villages by the Gladden "had long been deserted." Tolkien never tells us what happened to them.

The people who started with a sentence fragment end up with a desserted, empty riverbank.

SECTION: The Blank Exam Leaf, Around 1929

Everything we've gone over to this point is the inside view of the hobbit story. Outside of it, there's a second explanation. Tolkien leaned into this one for the rest of his life.

Sometime around 1928 or 1929, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford was sitting at home marking school exam papers for extra money, which is what underpaid academics with four children did. One candidate had left a page blank, and on it he wrote: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

Writing to the poet W. H. Auden in 1955, he added eight words about it.

"I did not and do not know why."

The date Tolkien wrote that does matter. For years it was pinned to the summer of 1930, until a scholar published Tolkien's son John's diary for the first of January 1930: "After tea Daddy read The Hobbit."

You can't read a book in January that you started in June. The scholar who'd argued for 1930 retracted it in public, and the honest answer now is the late twenties.

And over the years, this origin story kept improving. In 1938, when asked about it for the first time, Tolkien said: "I do not remember anything about the name and inception of the hero." In 1956 he told an interviewer the sentence he'd scrawled, and it was a different sentence: "At the edge of his hole stood the Hobbit."

In the biography published four years after his death we get a confident explanation: "Names always generate a story in my mind."

Fifty years of retelling a moment. The account gets richer as the memory gets further away, and he quietly stops admitting that he doesn't know.

How's that for irony? This is exactly what the Prologue says happened to the hobbits' account of themselves.

Then the hobbit walked into the wrong book. Three weeks after The Hobbit was published in 1937, Tolkien wrote to his publisher:

"I have only too much to say, and much already written, about the world into which the hobbit intruded."

So he thinks they intruded.

Years later he was still saying it: "The Hobbit was not intended to have anything to do with it." And in the foreword to the second edition he put it in print: "the story was drawn irresistibly towards the older world."

Hobbits have no creation myth partly because the creation myths were finished, in draft, years before hobbits existed. The mythology was missing a species that hadn't been invented yet.

Even the hobbits' own history arrived late, and we know it because Christopher Tolkien laid the drafts out. He notes "how much of the account of Hobbits and their origins actually emerged after the narrative of The Lord of the Rings was completed" - most of all the division into Harfoots, Stoors and Fallohides. The only description of the hobbit peoples we have was invented after the novel was finished, then written back into it - the Stoors were inserted into "The Shadow of the Past" afterwards. And in the early drafts, the descriptions of Harfoots and Stoors were swapped.

It stops being a simple accident here, though. Christopher also prints the same sentence at three stages. The 1938 draft says the exact relationship to Men "would be difficult to say." Then: "can no longer be told." Then the published version, the one we all know: "can no longer be discovered."

Tolkien didn't leave a gap. He found one, spent twenty years building a wall in front of it, and made the wall part of the story.

He never opened it later, either. Four years before he died he invented the Drúedain, the Woses, a small, ancient people he could put back into the First Age, and wrote that they "allow the introduction of characters somewhat similar to the Hobbits... into some of the legends of the First Age." Then, in the next paragraph, he slammed it shut. The Drúedain "are not however to be confused with or thought of as a mere variant on the hobbit theme."

At the end of his life he invented a new race of people to do the hobbits' job in the Elder Days. He also made it very clear that these people, were not hobbits.

SECTION: A New Line in the Old Lists

The absence of a real origin story does have its purpose. The Silmarillion tells us what, in its last chapter. Before the Ring came to the Shire, it says, hobbits "had been held of small account by Elves and by Men, and neither Sauron nor any of the Wise save Mithrandir had in all their counsels given thought to them."

Being beneath notice is their armour, and the book says so in the same breath that introduces them. They fly below the radar, and love it.

The lack of attention seeking may have ended up deciding the war.

In Unfinished Tales, working through the Nazgûl's hunt for the Ring, Tolkien wrote that Sauron "had never paid heed to the halflings ... and he did not yet know where their land lay." Under torture Gollum couldn't tell him much, partly because he didn't really know, and partly because he lied. The lie worked because it was a stale truth: he pointed the Enemy at the Gladden Fields, where hobbits genuinely had lived, centuries earlier. So the Riders went to the Anduin vales, searched, found deserted villages, and learned nothing.

Tolkien's verdict on this is verydirect. "This was a very small and natural error - but possibly the most important mistake that Sauron made in the whole affair. But for it, the Black Riders would have reached the Shire weeks sooner."

The Dark Lord's intelligence failure is a filing failure. He searched the last place hobbits were written down.

Elrond names the same principle at the Council, in the line everybody remembers: "small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere." And then a sharper one, straight to Frodo: "This is the hour of the Shire-folk, when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and counsels of the Great. Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it?"

Almost nobody - which doesn't put hobbits outside the story's design, the way people sometimes argue. They're Men, so they already hold the Gift of Men. And the Gift is freedom - the freedom to shape their lives beyond the Music, "which is as fate to all things else." They're inside the design and beneath its notice, and those are two very different things.

The smallness is critically important too. Talking about why Frodo and nobody else, Tolkien described a narrow window: "a person of greater native power could probably never have resisted the Ring's lure to power for so long; a person of less power could not hope to resist it in the final decision." If you're too strong, the Ring has something to offer you. Too weak, and it simply takes you. Hobbit-scale is a qualification for the job.

Tolkien did say what he thought all this meant. He reached for scripture, in Latin, in that same letter to Auden. Hobbits, he said, put "earth under the feet of romance." And then: we are all equal before the Great Author, "qui deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles." He has put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted the humble. It's the Magnificat, Mary's song in Luke's gospel, chosen by Tolkien himself.

And that brings us back to Fangorn, and to Merry, who gives us the entire story in a few words while Treebeard is still trying to work out what he's holding.

"We always seem to have got left out of the old lists, and the old stories. Yet we've been about for quite a long time. We're hobbits."

They were left out of the lists. That's the taxonomy - the Long List, the four free peoples, the appendix that files them under Men because no other category fits.

Left out of the stories.

That's the Elves, who wrote down everything and wrote nothing about them.

Merry says hobbits have been around for a long time, and nobody, including them, can really say how long. And don't forget, when Merry says "we're hobbits", that's somebody else's nickname for them, worn smooth by a language they lost.

A few sentences.

The entire missing origin, stated without complaint, by someone who doesn't need it.

And then at the Entmoot, the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun makes a correction himself:

"a new line shall be put in the old lists."

And Sam, halfway up the stairs into Mordor, thinks about this and can hardly believe it.

"Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still!"

The people who were left out of the old stories don't get a beginning.

But here, they certainly get written into the end.