Hobbits are a fictional race of people in the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien. About half average human height, Tolkien presented hobbits as a variety of humanity, or close relatives thereof. Occasionally known as halflings in Tolkien's writings, they live barefooted, and traditionally dwell in homely<!--British English--> underground houses which have windows, built into the sides of hills, though others live in houses. Their feet have naturally tough leathery soles (so they do not need shoes) and are covered on top with curly hair.
Hobbits first appeared in the 1937 children's novel The Hobbit, whose titular Hobbit is the protagonist Bilbo Baggins, who is thrown into an unexpected adventure involving a dragon. In its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits Frodo Baggins, Sam Gamgee, Pippin Took, and Merry Brandybuck are primary characters who all play key roles in fighting to save their world ("Middle-earth") from evil. In The Hobbit, hobbits live together in a small town called Hobbiton, which in The Lord of the Rings is identified as being part of a larger rural region called the Shire, the homeland of the hobbits in the northwest of Middle-earth. Some also live in a region east of the Shire, Bree-land, where they co-exist with Men.
The origins of the name and idea of "Hobbits" have been debated; literary antecedents include Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel Babbitt, and Edward Wyke Smith's 1927 The Marvellous Land of Snergs. The word "hobbit" also appears in a list of ghostly beings in The Denham Tracts (1895), though these bear no similarity to Tolkien's Hobbits. Scholars have noted Tolkien's denial of a relationship with the word "rabbit", pointing to several lines of evidence to the contrary.<!--this is cited in the 'Rabbit' section below--> Hobbits are modern, unlike the heroic ancient-style cultures of Gondor and Rohan, with familiar things like umbrellas, matches, and clocks. As such they mediate between the modern world known to readers and the heroic ancient world of Middle-earth.
Halflings appear as a race in Dungeons & Dragons, and the works of other fantasy authors including Terry Brooks, Jack Vance, and Clifford D. Simak.
Origins of the word
Tolkien claimed that he started The Hobbit suddenly, without premeditation, in the midst of grading a set of student essay exams in 1930 or 1931, writing its famous opening line on a blank piece of paper: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit".
In English literature
thumb|upright=0.6|A Snerg with a bow and arrows. [[Edward Wyke-Smith's 1927 The Marvellous Land of Snergs is seen by Tolkien scholars as an influence on Tolkien's hobbits. ]]
The term "hobbit", however, has real antecedents in modern English. One is a fact that Tolkien admitted: the title of Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel Babbitt, about a "complacent American businessman" who goes through a journey of some kind of self-discovery, facing "near-disgrace"; the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey observes that there are some parallels here with Bilbo's own journey.
According to a letter from Tolkien to W. H. Auden, one "probably ... unconscious" inspiration was Edward Wyke Smith's 1927 children's book The Marvellous Land of Snergs. Tolkien described the Snergs as "a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and [who] have the strength of ten men."
Another possible origin emerged in 1977 when the Oxford English Dictionary announced that it had found the source that it supposed Tolkien to have used: James Hardy wrote in his 1895 The Denham Tracts, Volume 2: "The whole earth was overrun with ghosts, boggles ... hobbits, hobgoblins." Shippey writes that the list was of ghostly creatures without bodies, nothing like Tolkien's solid flesh-and-blood hobbits. Tolkien scholars consider it unlikely that Tolkien saw the list.
Rabbit
An additional connection is with rabbit, one that Tolkien "emphatically rejected", although the word appears in The Hobbit in connection with other characters' opinions of Bilbo in several places. Bilbo compares himself to a rabbit when he is with the eagle that carries him; the eagle, too, tells Bilbo not to be "frightened like a rabbit". The giant bear-man Beorn teases Bilbo and jokes that "little bunny is getting nice and fat again", while the dwarf Thorin shakes Bilbo "like a rabbit".
Shippey writes that the rabbit is not a native English species, but was deliberately introduced in the 13th century, and has become accepted as a local wild animal. Shippey compares this "situation of anachronism-cum-familiarity" with the lifestyle of the Hobbit, giving the example of smoking "pipeweed". He argues that Tolkien did not want to write "tobacco", as it did not arrive until the 16th century, so Tolkien invented a calque made of English words.
Donald O'Brien, writing in Mythlore, notes, too, that Aragorn's description of Frodo's priceless mithril mail-shirt, "here's a pretty hobbit-skin to wrap an elven-princeling in", is a "curious echo" Tolkien set out a fictional etymology for the word "Hobbit" in an appendix to The Lord of the Rings, that it was derived from holbytla (plural holbytlan), meaning "hole-builder". This was Tolkien's own new construction from Old English hol, "a hole or hollow", and bytlan, "to build".
Description
Characteristics
Tolkien describes hobbits as between two and four feet (0.6–1.2 m) tall, with the average height being . They dress in bright colours, favouring yellow and green. They are usually shy, but are nevertheless capable of great courage and amazing feats under the proper circumstances. They are adept at throwing stones. For the most part, they cannot grow beards, but a few Stoor hobbits can. Their feet are covered with curly hair (usually brown, as is the hair on their heads) and have leathery soles, so Hobbits hardly ever wear shoes. Hobbits are not quite as stocky as the similarly sized dwarves, but still tend to be stout, with slightly pointed ears. Tolkien clarified their appearance in a 1938 letter to his American publisher:
Tolkien presented hobbits as relatives of the human race, or separate "branch" of humanity.
The race's average life expectancy is 100 years, but some of Tolkien's main Hobbit characters live much longer: Bilbo Baggins and the Old Took are described as living to the age of 130 or beyond, though Bilbo's long lifespan owes much to his possession of the One Ring. Hobbits are considered to "come of age" on their 33rd birthday, so a 50-year-old hobbit would be regarded as entering middle-age.
Types
thumb|upright=1.7|Hobbits are described as being of three types, Harfoots, Fallohides, and Stoors, all deriving from a region to the east of [[the Shire, in particular the Angle between two rivers, and migrating to the Shire at different times.]]
Tolkien devised a fictional history with three types of hobbits, with different physical characteristics and temperaments: Harfoots, Fallohides, and Stoors. By the time of Bilbo and Frodo, these kinds had intermixed for centuries, though unevenly, so that some families and regions skewed more towards descent from one of the three groups.
The Harfoots were by far the most numerous group of hobbits and were the first to enter the land of Eriador, which contains the Shire and Bree. They were the smallest in stature, "browner of skin" in complexion, and the most typical of the race as described in The Hobbit. They lived in holes, or smials, and had closer relations with Dwarves than other hobbits did. Harfoots tended to live in gentle rolling hill country, and were mostly agrarian. They were the first group to cross the Misty Mountains, settling in the lands around Bree starting in Third Age 1050 (about 2,000 years before the time of Bilbo and Frodo, and five and a half centuries before the founding of the Shire in Third Age 1601). Tolkien coined the term "Harfoot" as analogous to "hairfoot". Tolkien created the name from the archaic meanings of English words "fallow" and "hide", meaning "pale skin". Tolkien used the Old English word stor or stoor, meaning "strong".
They were extremely "clannish" and had strong "predilections for genealogy"; accordingly, Tolkien included several Hobbit family trees in The Lord of the Rings.
The hobbits of the Shire developed the custom of giving away gifts on their birthdays, instead of receiving them, although this custom was not universally followed among other hobbit cultures or communities. The term mathom is used for old and useless objects, but which hobbits are unwilling to throw away. Mathoms are invariably given as presents many times over, sometimes returning to the original owner, or are stored in a museum (mathom-house).
thumb|upright|Tolkien stated that he liked gardens, [[Trees and forests in Middle-earth|trees, and wearing waistcoats, just as hobbits did; he was often photographed with trees. Loess is a yellow soil, which would explain the colour of the Brandywine River, and the nature of the bricks made at Stock, the main Shire brickyard. Hobbit architecture favours round doors and windows.