Hobbits are the SPIRITUS MUNDI of England. They are meant by Tolkien to be the Anglo-Saxon earth spirits who are most in touch with the land itself. They literally live in the earth, and in so many ways are meant to define the essential elements of Englishness.
Hobbits are, after all, the holbytla (hole-builders and hole-dwellers), so it is logical that their first instinct is to work on the land. From their ground- level existence Hobbits have a profound under-standing of plant and animal life. They can grow almost anything on farms and in orchards and gardens under conditions that humans would not even attempt to grapple with.
It is not surprising, then, that one of the most famous figures in Hobbit history was a horticult-urist. The year SR 1070 is one date in their history that all Hobbits know, for it was in this year that the famous Hobbit farmer, Tobold Hornblower of Longbottom, succeeded in perfecting the cultivation and curing of sweet galenas.
The galena is a smoking herb akin to the modern nicotiana or tobacco plant, but apparently devoid of the unwholesome and poisonous aspects of modern tobacco. Popularly known as pipeweed, Old Toby Hornblower’s discovery was the beginning of an industry and tradition of which the Hobbits were proud inventors and most dedicated practitioners.
After Old Buck and Old Took, Old Toby is the most famous ancestral Hobbit in their early history. The name, of course, is a typical Tolkien jest: he is suggesting that our word tobacco originated in the name Old Toby, the Hobbit who originated the practice of smoking.
Old Toby, or Tobold Hornblower
TOBACCO
Other aspects of his name also suggest his fame and occupation. Tobold comes from the original name Theobold, meaning Bold Person; or literally it suggests “Too-bold,” a character larger than life. His second name suggests something similar about a vain and famous person, but Hornblower was actually an English occupational name for the foreman of a crew of workers who blew a horn to start and end the workday. Furthermore, there is a logical compression of someone using a hornpipe to blow smoke rings that might suggest a name like Hornblower for the inventor of pipe smoking.
TOBACCO AND TEA HOBBITS AND BROWNIES
One very curious thing about Hobbits is that the care Tolkien takes in making them the sprites of Old England (in the sense of being authentically Anglo-Saxon) is often thrown away with anachronisms that are characteristic of Victorian or Edwardian England. Nothing could be more typically nineteenth-and twentieth-century English than tobacco and tea~and nothing could be less Old English. One is from America and the other from India; regions totally unknown to Anglo-Saxons, but both familiar parts of the Victorians’ world.
Tolkien’s Hobbit culture is a distillation of all that is fundamentally English regardless of era. The anachronisms are intentional and meant to be humorous, but at the same time they show how Hobbits are spiritus mundi of the tamed landscape of England, not the wild original lands of Britain. That is why Tolkien’s Hobbits are derived from the English Hobs and Hobmen, but are linguistically distinct from those older British sprites, the Brownies.
In many obvious ways Hobbits are modelled on these ancient hill people of Britain. Brownies are diminutive, earth-dwelling, elusive, and usually helpful creatures. However, Brownies are essentially Celtic in spirit, while the Hobbits are absolutely English.
What Tolkien has given us in his tea-swilling, pipe-smoking, middle-class Hobbits is a distinct-ively English translation of the rather wild and anything-but-middle-class Brownies of the Celts.
Common Characteristics of Celtic Brownies and English Hobbits:
brown-haired
brown-skinned
dress in brown and earth colours
three feet tall or less
shy and secretive race
usually benevolent and helpful to friendly humans
some are of a humorous or mischievous disposition
most live in dwellings beneath hills
others live in woodland caverns
and still others prefer marshlands
FROM BUCCA THE HOBBIT TO PUCK OF POOK’S HILL
One story which undoubtedly influenced Tolkien’s writing was Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. This is the story of Shakespeare’s Puck as one of the last survivors of the People of the Hills, little brown, blue-eyed, freckled folk measuring just two to three feet, who live in secret dwellings beneath the ancient “hollow hills.”
In Kipling’s tale we learn that Puck people were once powerful pagan gods who came to Britain with the first oak, ash, and thorn trees. But now that all the great forests are gone, only a few survive to hide away in the hills and hollows of England.
Beyond the fact that Puck’s people strongly resemble Hobbits, there are elements of Elrond Half-Elven, Tom Bombadil, and Treebeard the Ent in Puck’s laments on the lost glories of the ancient world. But if we wish to see a true parallel between Puck’s people and Tolkien’s Hobbits, we need only look at the evolution of the name Puck.
From Shakespeare to Kipling, the name Puck has become the traditional name for a mischievous~but not malicious~English sprite or hobgoblin.
Where did this name come from?
PUCK is a Medieval English hobgoblin.
PUCKEL or PUKA, an Old English hobgoblin
PUCCA or POOKA, an Ancient Irish hobgoblin
BUCCA or BWCI, an Ancient Cornish or Welsh hobgoblin
What we witness here is the translation of the original Celtic hobgoblin, Bucca, into an English hobgoblin, Puck. However, it is no accident that one of the founding fathers of the Hobbits was called Bucca. It is another example of obscure Hobbitish humour: Tolkien implies that in the Hobbit Bucca we have the original archetypal British sprite, while Puck is but a pale imitation, only vaguely understood by Shakespeare and others.
Similarly, but with deeper understanding, by connecting Bucca to Puck, Tolkien declares his intention to draw up a comparable translation process in his transformation of Celtic Brownies to English Hobbits.
