Gollum questions.

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

I think that the detail of "half" is not particularly important. The Big Folk would have continued using halfling from habit and because it really does not matter if it is halfling or threequarterling, as long as it gets the point across. The hobbits would continue to be offended because halfling and threequarterling alike are diminutive in their nature, regardless of how accurate. No people wants to be named relative to another, since to each people they are the norm.

True. I very much agree.

In Breeland the names “Big Folk” and “Little Folk” are both accepted for different peoples, perhaps because in Breeland both of the peoples are considered to be equally Bree folk. In Breeland the name “Hobbit” is also used.

Those who were the ancestors of those called Hobbits must have come to a decision over whether their people should be reckoned as Men with some differences from normal Men in terms of size, normal length of life, and hair on their feet, or they should be reckoned as a separate people entirely, as different from Men as Elves and Dwarves. This decision was probably not taken at a single place and time, but emerged gradually. We see the results in the title gentlehobbit and when Merry and Pippin explain what kind of being they are to Treebeard, never thinking to explain that they are a special kind of Men and that Treebeard need not change his Old Lists.

Tolkien himself says in Letters, in a footnote to Letter 131 to Milton Waldman:

The Hobbits are, of course, really meant to be a branch of the specifically human race (not Elves or Dwarves) – hence the two kinds can dwell together (as at Bree) and are called just the Big Folk and Little Folk.

On names of peoples, Tolkien writes in Unfinished Tales, page 496: “Since Ghân-buri-Ghân was attempting to use the Common Speech he callled his people ‘Wild Men’ (not without irony); but this was not of course their own name for themselves.”

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

i did say that halfling had been accurate when coined. The point i was trying to make as i rambled was indeed that it would have seemed a bit cheeky for a five foot six Bree man to call a nearly four foot hobbit Halfling.

True. Except we do not know where and when the term halfling was coined. The term was almost true when in respect to the Númenóreans, but it seems to me very dubious that this was a term coined by Númenóreans who are never mentioned, either before or after the sinking of Númenór as ever present in the area of the upper Vales of Anduin, where the folk later known as Hobbits were first recorded as dwelling.

Presumably the earliest records of these people would be written in Sindarin and would use the name perian. But perian might well be a translation of the name used by their Mannish neighbours, who may have spoken Westron or may have spoken some other Mannish tongue.

But you are quite right that whether coined by an Elf or Man, the term halfling does seem insulting.