# Hobbit questions **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 28, 2012, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353 "2012-12-28T04:28:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Thinktank](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Thinktank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thinktank)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/1 "2012-12-28T04:28:21Z")
Yes, that’s right I’m not always asking serious questions 😛 Anyway, I obviously just got back from the movie and as I was sitting in the theater I started to wonder “what author invented Elves and Orcs and such?” What was the first reference of them? What implied feats of J.R.R Tolkien are not his to claim but only borrowed ideas from other literary works? I’m not trying to darken his doorstep, only discover the boundaries of his creativity. I Googled earlier, but was only met with an annotated version of “The Hobbit” in book form. Anybody wanna take a crack at the earliest known references to races and characters like that in the “hobbit series” (this includes the other works that have already been to the big screen). The point, is to discover THE “author” of particular races of beings or at very least attempt this. ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 4:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/2 "2012-12-28T04:38:30Z")
Other than possibly Ents, Tolkien didn’t really “invent” any of the species of Middle-Earth. Tolkien’s elves hark back to ancient stories of the Faerie, before the Victorians made them into Tinkerbell. The dwar(f)ves are in the Viking sagas. Trolls and goblins are ancient stories, as well. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/3 "2012-12-28T04:43:33Z")
Moved to Cafe Society. Colibri General Questions Moderator ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/4 "2012-12-28T04:50:25Z")
> [@jayjay](#): > > Other than possibly Ents, Tolkien didn’t really “invent” any of the species of Middle-Earth. Tolkien’s elves hark back to ancient stories of the Faerie, before the Victorians made them into Tinkerbell. The dwar(f)ves are in the Viking sagas. Trolls and goblins are ancient stories, as well. Orcs or nazgul? ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 4:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/5 "2012-12-28T04:57:27Z")
> [@Maserschmidt](#): > > Orcs or nazgul? Orcs are, when you get down to it, kind of non-specific boogeymen or goblins (divorced from the specificity of modern FRPGs). Nazgul are wraiths…black spirits. There have always been plenty of those. I’m not denigrating the Professor’s creation (ME?! Seriously?), I’m just noting that he didn’t actually invent most of the TYPES of creatures in it. What he did with the cast that he drew from legend and adapted to his world is genius, though. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 4:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/6 "2012-12-28T04:59:39Z")
> [@Maserschmidt](#): > > Orcs or nazgul? In _The Hobbit_, orcs are described as just a large variety of goblin. The Nazgul are just men, not a separate race. However, the “fell beasts” they ride owe more to pterodactyls than to any creature found in European or other traditional legends. Hobbits don’t clearly match any traditional legendary creatures, but owe features perhaps to dwarfs, gnomes, brownies, or leprechauns. They are more human-like than any of these, however. ---
**Author:** ![the\_diego](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@the\_diego](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/the_diego)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/7 "2012-12-28T05:03:30Z")
There’s Norse/Egyptian mythology for his Ainur, World War 2 for his war of the ring, the Edda for his third age characters, and the common Englishman for his hobbits. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 7:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/8 "2012-12-28T07:09:43Z")
The Wikipedia article sob “Elf” and “Elves in fantasy fiction and games” does a really good job of tracing Elves. The really short summary is that Tolkein invented nothing there. As other shave said, the wraiths and goblins are just generic restless dead and bogeymen, and certainly not something attributable to Tolkein. Hobbit themselves \*are \*his invention. While legend had plenty of little people, none of them were particularly similar to Hobbits, in the sense of being creatures of the everyday world, rather than from “fairyland” and being no more “magical” than the people you meet on the street. The Hobbits were. AFAIK, a unique creature in that they were a separate, non-human race that inhabited the mundane world, rather than the underworld or caves or haunted houses or similar “remote” locations. While that has been copied \*ad nauseum \*by later fantasy writers, to the best of my knowledge it was something invented by Tolkien, and no small part of the appeal of his world. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/9 "2012-12-28T07:16:01Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > However, the “fell beasts” they ride owe more to pterodactyls than to any creature found in European or other traditional legends. The animals the Nazgul rode correspond almost exactly to the legendary wyvern. ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 7:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/10 "2012-12-28T07:32:10Z")
> [@the\_diego](#): > > There’s Norse/Egyptian mythology for his Ainur, World War 2 for his war of the ring, the Edda for his third age characters, and the common Englishman for his hobbits. The man himself explicitly states that WW2 is not the inspiration for the War of the Ring. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 7:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/11 "2012-12-28T07:38:59Z")
> [@the\_diego](#): > > …the common Englishman for his hobbits. The common Englishman is 3 feet tall, has pointed ears, lives for 120 years on average, can move absolutely noiselessly through woodlands and has greater resistance to disease and poisons than other humans and lives in holes in the ground? I’m not seeing it. Care to explain? ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 7:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/12 "2012-12-28T07:55:25Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > The common Englishman is 3 feet tall, has pointed ears, lives for 120 years on average, can move absolutely noiselessly through woodlands and has greater resistance to disease and poisons than other humans and lives in holes in the ground? > > I’m not seeing it. Care to explain? I believe the argument was more to do with language, society, customs and so on, and I’ll cheerfully dispute that 120-year “average”; it’s mentioned somewhere that they “reached a hundred as often as not” but the Old Took himself just managed 130. ---
**Author:** ![the\_diego](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@the\_diego](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/the_diego)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 7:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/13 "2012-12-28T07:56:22Z")
> [@Malacandra](#): > > The man himself explicitly states that WW2 is not the inspiration for the War of the Ring. I kinda remember that too (intro before FOTR) but readers invariably conclude it was so. May have been the time frame during writing. We know “The Shadow of the Past” was written before 1940 but as Tolkien put it, LOTR “grew with the telling.” There are those who say WW 1 was a bigger inspiration. My take on that has more to do with his obvious reactions to things like urbanization, rise of industries, and developments that have made the world smaller (best demonstrated by the permanent closure of the undying lands, turning the world into a round sphere where mortals end up where they began.) Not intending to weasel out of an obvious error, i must admit the WW2 allusion is a bit off. ---
**Author:** ![the\_diego](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@the\_diego](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/the_diego)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 7:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/14 "2012-12-28T07:57:59Z")
> [@Malacandra](#): > > I believe the argument was more to do with language, society, customs and so on, and I’ll cheerfully dispute that 120-year “average”; it’s mentioned somewhere that they “reached a hundred as often as not” but the Old Took himself just managed 130. You answered it far better than I could have. I wanted an expansion of Gandalf’s pronouncement that “there is a power of another sort in the shire.” ---
**Author:** ![mbh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a6a055/32.png) [@mbh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mbh)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 10:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/15 "2012-12-28T10:42:44Z")
Another source for the nazgul: the [Oprichniki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprichnik), Ivan the Terrible’s goon squad. They rode black horses, they wore black robes, they exterminated Ivan’s enemies, and five centuries after they were disbanded, Russian mothers still invoke their name to frighten disobedient children. Ents: _The Wizard of Oz_ has talking trees, and _Alice Through the Looking Glass_ has talking flowers. Both pre-date _Lord of the Rings_. Not to mention the [Green Man](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Man). ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 11:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/16 "2012-12-28T11:46:18Z")
The first thing connected with _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_ that Tolkien wrote were stories that now can be found in _The Silmarillion_. He began working on them in 1917, twenty years before _The Hobbit_ was published and sixty years before _The Silmarillion_ was published. The idea of elves could go back into Proto-Germanic times: > **[Elf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf)** > > An elf (PL elves) is a type of humanoid supernatural being in Germanic folklore. Elves appear especially in North Germanic mythology, being mentioned in the Icelandic Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. > In medieval Germanic-speaking cultures, elves generally seem to have been thought of as beings with magical powers and supernatural beauty, ambivalent towards everyday people and capable of either helping or hindering them. However, the details of these beliefs have varied consid... There are some earlier uses of the word “orc”, but the creatures described weren’t that much like Tolkien’s: > **[Orc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc)** > > An orc (sometimes spelled ork; /ɔːrk/ orcish), in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth fantasy fiction, is a race of humanoid monsters, which he also calls "goblin". > Especially in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, orcs appear as a brutish, aggressive, ugly, and malevolent race of monsters, contrasting with the benevolent Elves. They are a corrupted race of elves, either bred that way by Morgoth, or turned savage in that manner, according to the Silmarillion. > The orc was a sort of "hell-devil" in ... In _The Hobbit_, the creatures he calls “orcs” are instead called “goblins”. This is also an old word: > **[Goblin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblin)** > > A goblin is a small, grotesque, monstrous creature that appears in the folklore of multiple European cultures. First attested in stories from the Middle Ages, they are ascribed conflicting abilities, temperaments, and appearances depending on the story and country of origin, ranging from mischievous household spirits to malicious, bestial thieves. They often have magical abilities similar to a fairy or demon, such as the ability to shapeshift. > Similar creatures include brownies, dwarves, duen... Dwarves go way back too: > **[Dwarf (folklore)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_(Germanic_mythology))** > > A dwarf (PL dwarfs or dwarves) is a type of supernatural being in Germanic folklore. Accounts of dwarfs vary significantly throughout history; however, they are commonly, but not exclusively, presented as living in mountains or stones and being skilled craftsmen. In early literary sources, only males are explicitly referred to as dwarfs, although they are described as having sisters and daughters, while both male and female dwarfs feature in later saga literature and folklore. Dwarfs are sometime... You should read some books on Germanic mythology. One place to start might be reading the text of Richard Wagner’s series of operas _The Ring of the Nibelung_. This is how, for instance, most Germans (and a lot of other people) know about Germanic mythology. (And, no, he’s not a relative of mine.) There are many obvious ways in which bits of the plot of _The Ring of the Nibelung_ is found in Tolkien’s works. Of course, it’s even more important that you read the books _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_. ---
**Author:** ![Skammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skammer/32/143_2.png) [@Skammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skammer)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/17 "2012-12-28T14:29:42Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Hobbit themselves \*are \*his invention. While legend had plenty of little people, none of them were particularly similar to Hobbits, in the sense of being creatures of the everyday world, rather than from “fairyland” and being no more “magical” than the people you meet on the street. The Hobbits were. AFAIK, a unique creature in that they were a separate, non-human race that inhabited the mundane world, rather than the underworld or caves or haunted houses or similar “remote” locations. While that has been copied \*ad nauseum \*by later fantasy writers, to the best of my knowledge it was something invented by Tolkien, and no small part of the appeal of his world. I never thought of this before, but based on your description it could be argued that Hobbits are very similar to Munchkins of Oz, which predate Hobbits by only a couple of decades. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve read Frank Baum’s books but I seem to recall that Munchkins were clever little people and somewhat child-like but not particularly magical or fairy-like. And they lived in normal (but small) houses. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/18 "2012-12-28T15:57:47Z")
There’s been an immense amount of research on what influenced Tolkien. There’s no evidence that he read any of the Oz books: > **[J. R. R. Tolkien's influences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien's_influences)** > > J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy books on Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, drew on a wide array of influences including language, Christianity, mythology, archaeology, ancient and modern literature, and personal experience. He was inspired primarily by his profession, philology; his work centred on the study of Old English literature, especially Beowulf, and he acknowledged its importance to his writings. > He was a gifted linguist, influenced by Germanic, Celtic... ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/19 "2012-12-28T16:15:28Z")
> [@Thinktank](#): > > Yes, that’s right I’m not always asking serious questions 😛 > > Anyway, I obviously just got back from the movie and as I was sitting in the theater I started to wonder “what author invented Elves and Orcs and such?” > > What was the first reference of them? What implied feats of J.R.R Tolkien are not his to claim but only borrowed ideas from other literary works?.. Tolkien was a great scholar of Northern myth & legend. He would never have claimed that he “invented” elves or dwarves or dragons. He was also well-read in more recent literature; there’s an etymology for [orc](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc#Etymology) although he tailored the creatures to fit his fantasy world. He invented Hobbits. (And probably Tom Bombadil, but we don’t like to mention him.) ---
**Author:** ![Skammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skammer/32/143_2.png) [@Skammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skammer)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2012, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353/20 "2012-12-28T16:30:15Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > There’s been an immense amount of research on what influenced Tolkien. There’s no evidence that he read any of the Oz books: > > [Influences on Tolkien - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien's_influences) Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that they were an influence. Just that they are similar creations. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hobbit-questions/645353.md?page=2)