[Child of the 7th Age]

Imp –

Fascinating stuff!

How likely to do think it is that Tolkien got his ideas for half-yard-high Hobbits from reading Sylvie and Bruno

Since I haven’t read this source, I can’t speak directly to your point. But I do have some general thoughts on hobbit origins and how JRRT’s mind worked.

As with most of the Legendarium, I don’t think we’ll ever nail the Professor down to a single source on the origin of Hobbits. His mind was too eclectic. Consciously or subconsciously, he likely drew ideas from a dozen different sources. And these sources, whatever their original form, were reshaped into something totally new. All we can do is identify interesting references, as you’ve done here, and speculate what the tie might be.

There are so many tales of ‘little folk’, but these are always faerie creatures. Michael Denham, a British folklorist in the mid-19th century, even included the word “Hobbit” amid a long list of brownies, fays, hobgoblins, boggarts and such. But, unlike Tolkien’s Hobbits, all of these were faerie folk. What makes your reference from Carroll interesting is that, like Tolkien, he was describing short manlike beings.

Imp - Hope you won’t mind if I mention another literary work that probably played a part in the origin of Hobbits: The Marvellous Land of Snergs by E. A. Wyke-Smith . Have you read it? With some difficulty, I managed to track down a copy and will likely add a review to Helen's thread. Douglas Anderson and other scholars have mentioned the tie-in before, but I don’t think we’ve ever discussed it on the Downs. (A search under ‘snergs’ and the author’s name only turned up a one-sentence reference from a post that Squatter did. ) Squatter's post on Snergs....

Wyke-Smith’s book was published in 1927, about three years before Tolkien began work on the The Hobbit. In his Letters, Tolkien acknowledges that this book may have had an influence on his concept of Hobbits. He had read it aloud to his children night after night. His son Michael even wrote stories with snerg-inspired characters (Wow, a fanfiction writer in the Tolkien family!).

In “On Fairy Stories” originally given as a lecture in 1939, a great deal of the material included in the notes never got into the version that was actually published in 1947. The omitted material included the following sentence:

I should like to record my own love and my children’s love of E.A. Wyke Smiths’s [The] Marvellous Land of Snergs, at any rate of the snerg element in that tale, and of Gorbo, the gem of dunderheads, jewel of a companion in an escapade.

Interestingly, the last sentence echoes the very same language Tolkien later used in letter #76 written to his own son Christopher in 1944 where he describes Samwise as a “jewel among the hobbits.”

Despite the fact snergs were said to be distant offspring of the pixies, they don’t have a magical bone in their bodies. And like Carroll’s little folk, they don’t dwell in faerie or a dream realm; they live in a “real” place in the human world that is “set apart” (shades of the Shire!) and difficult to reach because of quirks of weather and navigation.

A snerg is a practical and prosaic creature who stands as tall as a table-top. His greatest joy in life is giving and attending feasts. The hero of Wyke’s book is a snerg named “Gorbo”. Some of this sounds familiar to me!

So I’m sure Tolkien had a lot of ideas percolating in his head when he sat down and told his children bedtimes stories. And some of these ideas eventually found their way into the printed manuscript of the Hobbit.