So what are hobbits? And how did Tolkien come to write the seminal sentence in that momentary gap when an alert concentration suddenly slackened, and allowed, one might imagine, something long repressed or long incubating to break free? Where did hobbits come from, as an idea?
To this last question there are several answers, of increasing levels of interest and complexity. Perhaps the simplest and least satisfying one is gained by looking the word 'hobbit' up in the dictionary--specifically, in the Oxford English Dictionary, a gigantic collective project more than a century old, which Tolkien had himself worked for and contributed to in his youth, but which he perhaps as a result continually disagreed with and even went out of his way (in Farmer Giles of Ham) to mock. The second edition of the OED, published in 1989, says only, 'In the tales of J.R.R. Tolkien ... one of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race, that gave themselves the name' (etc.), which gets us no further. However Robert Burchfield, former chief editor of the OED, reported with some pride in the Times for 31st May 1979 that hobbits had at last been run to earth. The word did exist before Tolkien. It is found, once, in a publication called The Denham Tracts, a series of pamphlets and jottings on folklore collected by Michael Denham, a Yorkshire tradesman, in the 1840s and 1850s, and re-edited by James Hardy for the Folklore Society in the 1890s. 'Hobbits' appear in Volume 2 (1895). There they come, by my count, 154th in a list of 197 kinds of supernatural creatures which includes, with a certain amount of repetition, barguests, breaknecks, hobhoulards, melch-dicks, tutgots, swaithes, cauld-lads, lubberkins, mawkins, nick-nevins, and much, much else, along with the relatively routine boggarts, hob-thrusts, hobgoblins, and so on. No futher mention is made of hobbits, and Hardy's index says of them, as of almost all the items in the list, only 'A class of spirits'[emphasis mine-Scarbonac]. Tolkien's hobbits, of course, are anything but 'spirits'. They are almost pig-headedly earthbound