Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3342280" data-attributes="member: 30001">On the original topic.  I find both the concepts of hobbit and orc to be fairly unique to Tolkien and I would suspect that their respective use/avoidance is based on historical happenstance.  I think "orc" in the Old English poem Beowulf (which I last read online, should be easy enough to find) pretty simply meant demon, not "humanoid creature that's a stereotypical barbarous human".  Thus I think Tolkien used the word orc and the rest was his invention.  Perhaps these nuances were not as easily understood by a court of law.The derivation of hobbit IIRC was pretty much laid out in the appendix of the Return of the King, and I don't remember Tolkien citing any folklore source.  Especially when you try to define a hobbit to someone (furry feet, pipe-smokers, live in holes with doors on them, dislike machinery) and then try to compare it to a folklore equivalent.  IMO it's fairly unique.When people say that orcs and hobbits come from folklore, I think they are way over-generalizing based on a few similarities to existing creatures.  And every time I've seen such a statement, it never really cites a reference or gives me much to work with.  If someone can point me to a traditional fairy tale where a small elfish-creature has furry feet (besides the grugach, of course) or has Beowulf battling a horde of orcs streaming out of a cave, then I would stand corrected (and better informed).</blockquote>

Verification