People around the planet have been waiting. The Peter Jackson film of the first part of The Hobbit, based upon the children’s classic by J.R.R. Tolkien, which has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, is imminent.
There may still be some who might ask, ‘What is a hobbit?’ But with the book’s readership so vast, and audiences of The Hobbit sequel film, The Lord of the Rings, so numerous, images of hobbits are familiar, in their colourful, rustic clothes. As Tolkien wrote, when he first introduced them to the world, hobbits ‘are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than bearded dwarves’. Hobbit identity is tied up with their home country, The Shire, from which the hero of The Hobbit, Mr. Bilbo Baggins, sets out on an adventure, in the teeth of long years of provincial respectability. Before the late 1920s, or thereabouts, however, the word ‘hobbit’ in the new familiar sense did not exist.
In the middle of marking exams
The name ‘hobbit’, in fact, had popped out of Tolkien’s head when he was a Professor of Old English at Oxford University, and was marking school exam papers for extra money to pay household bills. This was in the days before a free health service and good quality schools without fees and the Tolkien family were often short of money.
