The Hobbit is set in Middle-earth and follows home-loving Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit of the title, who joins the wizard Gandalf and the thirteen dwarves of Thorin's Company, on a quest to reclaim the dwarves' home and treasure from the dragon Smaug. Bilbo's journey takes him from his peaceful rural surroundings into more sinister territory.
Bilbo accepts only a small portion of his share of the treasure, having no want or need for more, but still returns home a very wealthy hobbit roughly a year and a month after he first left. Years later, he writes the story of his adventures.
In a 1955 letter to W. H. Auden, Tolkien recollects that he began work on The Hobbit one day early in the 1930s, when he was marking School Certificate papers. He found a blank page. Suddenly inspired, he wrote the words, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." By late 1932 he had finished the story and then lent the manuscript to several friends, including C. S. Lewis[12] and a student of Tolkien's named Elaine Griffiths.[13] In 1936, when Griffiths was visited in Oxford by Susan Dagnall, a staff member of the publisher George Allen & Unwin, she is reported to have either lent Dagnall the book[13] or suggested she borrow it from Tolkien.[14] In any event, Dagnall was impressed by it, and showed the book to Stanley Unwin, who then asked his 10-year-old son Rayner to review it. Rayner's favourable comments settled Allen & Unwin's decision to publish Tolkien's book.[15]
In December 1937 The Hobbit's publisher, Stanley Unwin, asked Tolkien for a sequel. In response Tolkien provided drafts for The Silmarillion, but the editors rejected them, believing that the public wanted "more about hobbits".[51] Tolkien subsequently began work on The New Hobbit, which would eventually become The Lord of the Rings,[51] a course that would not only change the context of the original story, but lead to substantial changes to the character of Gollum.
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. They also live in a village east of the Shire, called Bree, where they co-exist with Men. Tolkien hints that there may be other Hobbit settlements thereabouts, but they are never visited in the story.
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. Tolkien emphatically rejected a relationship with the word "rabbit", and emphasized hobbits' humanity, though scholars have noted several lines of evidence to the contrary.
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[2] opening line on a blank piece of paper: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit".[3][4]
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.[6] Tolkien scholars consider it unlikely that Tolkien saw the list.[8]
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.[6] 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"[9] of the English nursery rhyme "To find a pretty rabbit-skin to wrap the baby bunting in."[9]
The Harfoots lived on the lowest slopes of the Misty Mountains in Hobbit-holes dug into the hillsides. They were not only smaller and shorter, but also beard- and bootless. The Stoors lived on the marshy Gladden Fields where the Gladden River met the Anduin, and were broader and heavier in build; and the Fallohides preferred to live in the woods under the Misty Mountains. They were described as fairer of skin and hair, as well as taller and slimmer than the rest of the hobbits.[T 6]
Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely traveling any farther than his pantry or cellar. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day to whisk him away on an adventure. They have launched a plot to raid the treasure hoard guarded by Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon. Bilbo reluctantly joins their quest, unaware that on his journey to the Lonely Mountain he will encounter both a magic ring and a frightening creature known as Gollum.
For fans of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings series, Tolkien's first novel, The Hobbit, is just as - if not more - important than the trilogy. The Hobbit follows Bilbo Baggins, the titular hobbit whose adventures and story will be familiar to any fan of The Lord of the Rings!
This jacket takes its inspiration from the ancient tomes and lore represented throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Our designers created an aged leather-look jacket complete with Bilbo Baggins's initials emblazoned on the front cover.
A hobbit, h, is a type of monster that appears in NetHack. The hobbit is the most basic humanoid monster, and is a small omnivore that has infravision and will pick up items. A hobbit has a single weapon attack.
While a hobbit is not too dangerous on their own, a weaker early character should not approach them without some caution - a hobbit with an enchanted dagger or any form of attack wand can be an unwelcome and possibly lethal surprise. Hobbits have a tendency to throw their daggers at you when you are in range, making disarming them trivial, and can usually be felled easily with your own ranged attacks.
Hobbits are useful as potential early sources of a mithril-coat, daggers to fill your quiver, or an elven dagger to name and turn into Sting. Lawful characters will want their pets to handle peaceful hobbits if they plan to avoid alignment record penalties.
Hobbits are a fictional race of people that appear in J.R.R. Tolkien's novels set in Middle-Earth, and have since appeared in the works of other fantasy authors including Terry Brooks, Jack Vance, and Clifford D. Simak. Occasionally known as halflings in Tolkien's writings, hobbits are humanoids that are closely related to humans, if not an offshoot of humanity - they stand at anywhere between two and four feet, with the average height of a hobbit being roughly half the average human height. Hobbits have feet with naturally tough leathery soles and curly hair on the top, and tend to live barefoot; they traditionally make their home in underground "hobbit holes" with windows built into the sides of hills on pastoral countrysides, while some also live in cottage houses on the surface. Hard-working, orderly and peaceful, hobbits enjoy many "creature comforts" and have a particular love of food and drink - but they are also naturally curious and enthusiastic collectors, and sometimes prefer a bit of trouble to a lot of boredom.
Hobbits debut in 1937 children's novel The Hobbit, where the titular protagonist Bilbo Baggins is thrown into an unexpected adventure when the wizard Gandalf arrives at his doorstep in the small town of Hobbiton. In the sequel to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins, Sam Gamgee, Pippin Took, and Merry Brandybuck are a group of hobbits who all play key roles in fighting to save their world of Middle-earth from evil. The Lord of the Rings identifies Hobbiton as part of the homeland of the Hobbits: a larger rural region in the northwest of Middle-earth called the Shire. Another hobbit village named Bree is found east of the Shire, where they co-exist with regular humans. Tolkien hints that there may be other hobbit settlements, though they are never visited within the story.
The origins of the name and idea are subject to debate, with the most likely antecedents including 1922 Sinclair Lewis novel Babbitt and 1927 Edward Wyke Smith children's book The Marvellous Land of Snergs. Many of Tolkien's British reviewers imagined hobbits to be rabbit-like in appearance; though Tolkien emphatically rejected any relationship between hobbits and rabbits and emphasized hobbits' humanity, scholars have noted several lines of evidence to the contrary. As with many other beings and creatures from the setting, hobbits also appear in Dungeons & Dragons, where they are referred to as halflings for legal reasons.
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