Were the Hobbits based on the Welsh people, language, cultural, housing, etc.?
The word and the concept seem to have been inspired by The Marvellous Land of Snergs, a children's book from 1927 by E. A. Wyke-Smith, and by Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt (1922). The Snergs were, in Tolkien's words, "a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and of great strength."[6] Tolkien wrote to W. H. Auden that The Marvellous Land of Snergs "was probably an unconscious source-book for the Hobbits, not of anything else", and he told an interviewer that the word hobbit "might have been associated with Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. Certainly not rabbit, as some people think. Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place."[7]
However, Tolkien claims that he started writing The Hobbit after suddenly, without premeditation, writing on a blank piece of paper: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit"[8]. The misunderstanding of rabbit may have to do with hobbits' disposition to tunnels, and the fact The Hobbit Bilbo is mockingly described several times as a rabbit in the original text.
so not the welsh.
* 15 hours ago
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbit
iCelticprincessz · Sun Mar 30, 2008 @ 08:28pm · 0 Comments
