What is a Hobbit?

I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people, about half our height…

J.RR. Tolkien, The Hobbit

One day, a few years back, I happened to be reading a forgotten lecture delivered in 1900 to the Anthropological section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.*

The lecture concerned Welsh folklore and was delivered by the first Oxford Professor of Celtic, John Rhys. Discussing Welsh stories of fairies, or ‘the little people’, Rhys argued that the folk stories passed down the generations in Wales contained dim memories of a very ancient race of people that once dwelt in the British Isles. From the stories Rhys inferred that these people had been:

a small swarthy population of mound-dwellers, of an unwarlike disposition… and living underground.

Turning to archaeology Rhys pointed to the remains of “certain underground — or partially underground — habitations”. He argued that some of these:

dwellings appear from the outside like hillocks covered with grass, so as presumably not to attract attention…. But one of the most remarkable things about them is the fact that the cells or apartments into which they are divided are frequently so small that their inmates must have been of very short stature, like our Welsh fairies. Thus… there must have been a people of that description…

That Tolkien engaged with Rhys there can be no doubt. Rhys was teaching Welsh folklore when Tolkien first went up to Oxford, and the young Tolkien probably attended his lectures on the Mabínogían. And in some of his later scholarly work (see especially ‘The Name Nodens’) Tolkien demonstrates a careful reading of Rhys’s work.

Did Tolkien discover Hobbits in the pages of Rhys’s writing on Welsh fairies?

I think so. And as the release of the third and final installment of The Hobbit movie draws nearer I will revisit this question from time to time on this blog, providing further reasons for believing this to be so, and offering one or two thoughts on its significance in relation to Tolkien’s wider project of creating a mythology for England.

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*See John Rhys, ‘Presidential Address to Section H. of the BAAS’, Report of the Seventieth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, London: John Murray, 1900, pp. 884-896.

Note, with reference to my post of yesterday, that Rhys was not addressing a gathering of students of literature but of anthropology.