![]() ![]() These animals could speak to Beornings or Bear-folk, who were Shape-shifters and can take the shape of a Bear or Man. – being pedantic here, but ‘hobgoblin’ is a pleonasm, not a tautology.Bears were great, fierce creatures in Middle-earth. Īn ironic note: just as General Fairfax (‘pale hair’) was so notoriously black-haired, dark-eyed and generally swarthy that he was known to the troops as “Black Tom”, Shadowfax (‘dark hair’) is white… The language of the Rohirrim, don’t forget, is presented as old english in LOTR, so it’s no surprise that OE words like ‘fax’ appear. ‘Fax’ is just an old word for hair (or grass), so is a common enough naming element for animals, or indeed people (eg the Civil War general, Thomas Fairfax, or the founder of Port Moresby, Fairfax Moresby). – unless you’ve specific reason to think shadowfax and silverfax are related, it looks just like coincidence. Nor can it explain the relation, if any, between ‘goblin’ and ‘kobold’ – because goblin, if not directly derived from ‘kobold’, derives from a latin word that has /k/ in it (ie doesn’t reflect an underlying PIE /g/ that could have become /k/ in germanic). that would be /g/ > /k/ – only the voiced aspirate and the voiceless stop become fricatives under grimm’s law! Grimm’s law also can’t explain the relation between english and german, since both languages underwent grimm’s law. ‘kobold’ and ‘goblin’ may or may not be related, we don’t know ![]() – ‘hob’ and ‘kobold’ have nothing to do with each other. So when Theoden calls hobbits ‘holbytla’, Tolkien is portraying him as using tolkien’s word in tolkien’s language, ‘kud-dukan’, but as being translated by tolkien using tolkien’s word in old english, ‘holbytla’, which in turn is a fictional etymology for Tolkien’s word in modern english, ‘hobbit’, which tolkien would have us believe is a word made up by tolkien, but only to translate the he-tells-us non-made-up (but in reality actually made-up) word ‘kuduk’. – hobbits of course don’t call themselves hobbits – they call themselves kuduks, which has the same relation to the other made-up word kud-dukan as hobbit has to holbytla. – ‘holbytla’ is a word Tolkien made up as a fake etymology of ‘hobbit’ (and which appears in LOTR). – there’s no evidence, so far as I’ve heard, that he’d heard about the denham list… but as a philologist and fairy tale enthusiast, he would presumably have known at once that a ‘hobbit’ was a small hob, which is to say a sprite or elf or pixie of some kind His next thought was to try to work out what a ‘hobbit’ would be like – Tolkien did indeed by writing that line. ![]() In similar fashion, perhaps we can say that Tolkien both invented the word and didn’t invent it: that is, he independently came up with the word, unaware that it already existed in a similar sense (though certainly before him there appears to be no description of what ‘hobbits’ are supposed to look like). A similar thing probably occurred with Lewis Carroll and ‘slithy’: the word had been in use since the 1620s, as a variant of ‘sleathy’ (lazy and slovenly) but Carroll seems to have independently coined the word (as a portmanteau of ‘lithe’ and ‘slimy’) for his 1871 poem ‘Jabberwocky’. However, perhaps he did independently invent the word, and had no knowledge of the Denham Tracts or an earlier source which Denham was drawing on. (He was steeped in folklore, being a professor of medieval literature and philology – language study – at Oxford.) It is possible that Tolkien came across the word in this list of ‘sprites’ and other creatures, and in that moment of clarity when he scribbled down his opening line on a sheet of paper, he was dredging up the word from his memory. ![]()
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