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Actually tolkien named Bilbo after Bilboa in Spain.I read it in a book.
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Bilbao, you mean (we wouldn't want to confuse it with Balboa)... the city's Basque name is indeed Bilbo. I've lived there, in fact. Where did you read this?
It seems extraordinarily unlikely, even to a euskophile like me, that this is more than a simple coincidence. First of all, the hobbits are quite clearly English (although I have indeed noticed certain hobbitlike tendencies in Basque culture, such as the idiosyncratic (though not subterranean) houses), and I can think of no other Basque or Spanish influence anywhere in the books, although I would have been happy to have noticed it. Second of all, although I like the city very much, Tolkien would probably have hated it. It's a very industrial port town with a river that they're currently making a valiant attempt to clean. The streets are all paved (though some are very narrow and winding and more like stones than concrete) and you don't see trees until you get out into Getxo. And then, of course, there are the museum of modern art (the Guggenheim; if you've heard of Bilbao, it's probably why) and the resident terrorists, although both of these are post-
Hobbit . It's a post-Sharkey Shire, if anything.
Birdland's explanation seems by far the most likely. But I'm very curious about what book is handing out this information. What connection do they see between the two?
(By the way, why is this in the "Movies" forum?)
--Belin
Ibaimendi
[ November 06, 2002: Message edited by: Belin ]