Wherefore Orcs?

[hellbender]

Actually, unless you want to call Tolkien a liar, that's entirely coincidental. Hobbit was derived from actual Old English roots, hence the Rohirrim term hol-bytla.

It is strange that a book on fey written in England some years earlier than the Hobbit clearly contains the word hobbit in it. The old boy isn't around to defend himself, but he also didn't coin the word hobbit. He may have picked it up from reading several texts and used it subconciously, but he clearly did not create the word hobbit, nor was he the first to put the word into print.

hellbender

 

[Desdichado]

I'm not saying you can't call Tolkien a liar, just that he specifically says he made up the name tooling around with Old English roots and seeing how they'd be today.

He may very well be lying (although I certainly don't believe he was.) Stranger coincidences than that have certainly been known to happen.

 

[hellbender]

I don't want to call him a liar at all, I am a big Tolkien fan myself, I grew up on the books, and re-read them often. He may have skimmed the word and forgotten where he picked it up quite easily, the depth the man went to in creating an entire cosmology has yet to be rivaled. I am just saying that the word 'hobbit' (especially in regards to fey-like little people) was printed in a British work in the 1800's. I am more irritated by the license holders who rabidly hold onto a word already in print before Tolkien was born. Why not snap up goblin as well? Or troll?

hellbender

 

[Tonguez]

The Great Sea Orc...

In the sea that washes the coast of Ireland there is an island called Ebuda, whose inhabitants, once numerous, had been wasted by the anger of Proteus till there were now but few left. This deity was incensed by some neglect of the usual honors which he had in old times received from the inhabitants of the land, and, to execute his vengeance, had sent a horrid sea-monster, called an Orc, to devour them. Such were the terrors of his ravages that the whole people of the isle had shut themselves up in the principal town, and relied on their walls alone to protect them. In this distress they applied to the Oracle for advice, and were directed to appease the wrath of the sea-monster by offering to him the fairest virgin that the country could produce.

From Legends of Charlemagne

 

[kenjib]

None of the names similar to orc previously referenced a race of twisted rampaging humanoids bent on conquest via armies. Pretty much all of them after Tolkein do.

 

[andrew]

I don't want to call him a liar at all, I am a big Tolkien fan myself, I grew up on the books, and re-read them often. He may have skimmed the word and forgotten where he picked it up quite easily, the depth the man went to in creating an entire cosmology has yet to be rivaled. I am just saying that the word 'hobbit' (especially in regards to fey-like little people) was printed in a British work in the 1800's. I am more irritated by the license holders who rabidly hold onto a word already in print before Tolkien was born. Why not snap up goblin as well? Or troll?

hellbender

I've heard this thrown around a few times, but no one has ever been able to satisfy me with a source for this statement. Hellbender, can you point me to this pre-Tolkien 'hobbit' source?

 

[Scarbonac]

I don't want to call him a liar at all, I am a big Tolkien fan myself, I grew up on the books, and re-read them often. He may have skimmed the word and forgotten where he picked it up quite easily, the depth the man went to in creating an entire cosmology has yet to be rivaled. I am just saying that the word 'hobbit' (especially in regards to fey-like little people) was printed in a British work in the 1800's. I am more irritated by the license holders who rabidly hold onto a word already in print before Tolkien was born. Why not snap up goblin as well? Or troll?

hellbender

From Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/167133/ref=ed_cp_7_2_b/104-4026531-7730340

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

The article continues to state that JRRT might have seen the word and forgotten that he had seen it.

And...?

It's not the word itself, it's the application; the word orc in some form existed prior to Tolkien, but not in his specific application. ''Jesus'' isn't (and prolly can't be) copyrighted or trademarked, but try and create & publicize a cartoon about/T-shirt featuring/short story about South Park Jesus without being sued. The right to create derivative works lies with the copyright holder except in the case of parody or satire, which also makes the bulk of fanfiction a gross copyright violation, but most people won't expend the energy to run it down...except Anne McCaffrey and maybe a few others.

Captain Marvel of SHAZAM! fame was put out of business not because the character too closely resembled Superman, but because many of his adventures were deliberate rip-offs of previously-published (and copyrighted) Superman stories. If I want to write comics about ''Superman'', a character who is a consummate computer hacker and cracker, that's cool...but if you start writing about ''Superman'' who is the last son of Krypton, you'd better be working for DC Comics.

A ''hobbit'' that was counted as a member of ''a class of spirits'' was probably considered to be something along the lines of a booka, brownie, pixie, sprite, et cetera...all of which are magical faerie critters and nothing like the decidedly un-magical Middle-Earth hobbits.

Middle-Earth Hobbits, created by Tolkien, are not in any way ''fey-like'' nor are they ''a class of spirits''; they are romanticized fat little hairy-footed commoners of the romanticized English countryside. The appearance of the word ''hobbit'' in an obscure reference-work means nothing in that respect. If I wanted to create a character who uses an Uzi, is 6' tall and calls himself ''Hobbit'', I can; but if I want to write about fat little furry-footed country Englishmen who live in tunnel-houses and call them ''hobbits'', then the Tolkien estate has a perfect right to come after my ass on copyright violations.


Back to orcs, the putative topic of the thread -- Elizabeth Moon's The Deed Of Paksenarrion is replete with orcs, but then again, TDOP also has the best depiction of a D&D-genre campaign-world that I have ever seen in novel form, bar none.

 

[hellbender]

A ''hobbit'' that was counted as a member of ''a class of spirits'' was probably considered to be something along the lines of a booka, brownie, pixie, sprite, et cetera...all of which are magical faerie critters and nothing like the decidedly un-magical Middle-Earth hobbits.

Middle-Earth Hobbits, created by Tolkien, are not in any way ''fey-like'' nor are they ''a class of spirits''; they are romanticized fat little hairy-footed commoners of the romanticized English countryside. The appearance of the word ''hobbit'' in an obscure reference-work means nothing in that respect. If I wanted to create a character who uses an Uzi, is 6' tall and calls himself ''Hobbit'', I can; but if I want to write about fat little furry-footed country Englishmen who live in tunnel-houses and call them ''hobbits'', then the Tolkien estate has a perfect right to come after my ass on copyright violations.

Ah, but hobbits, as described by Tolkien in the preface to the Fellowship of the Ring are alluded to as having fey-like qualities, and are definitely not just small humans. Yes, there is no concrete evidence to support the lifting of hobbit, Tolkien was a very learned man, not an idiot.


hellbender

 

[Scarbonac]

Ah, but hobbits, as described by Tolkien in the preface to the Fellowship of the Ring are alluded to as having fey-like qualities, and are definitely not just small humans.

''Fey-like qualities'' such as...? I'm terribly afraid that I'm going to have to ask you to actually back that up with quotes, rather than the very general statements that you've been making.

Originally posted by hellbender Yes, there is no concrete evidence to support the lifting of hobbit, Tolkien was a very learned man, not an idiot.


hellbender

There's no evidence that he lifted anything from anywhere; the only other mention of ''hobbits'' is as ''a class of spirit'' in an obscure reference work, which is a world of difference from the hobbit that everyone knows, the plain-spoken, quiet, fat, non-magical hairy-footed home-body given to farming, grinding grain, eating & drinking to excess and smoking a good pipe. How ''fey-like'' is that?

 

[Wicht]

I've heard this thrown around a few times, but no one has ever been able to satisfy me with a source for this statement. Hellbender, can you point me to this pre-Tolkien 'hobbit' source?

Find a copy of An Encyclopedia of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and other supernatural Creatures by Katharine Briggs and look up the entry on Denham Tracts, The (pg 93-94)

It contains the quote in question and is probably easier to find a copy of than the actual Denham Tracts.

I myself have mentioned this quote on these very boards about a year ago now.

However, it is likely that the word, as coined by Tolkien, is only coincedentally the same as another word already in use for a similar creature. The word "Hob" is a pretty common fairy folk word - hob, hobthrust, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, etc. for example. In fact in the aforementioned book one finds the following quote under the entry for "Hob"
Hob is the general name for a tribe of kindly, beneficent and occassionally mischevious spirits to which the BROWNIE belongs.

My opinion is that Tolkien probably created the Hobbit based in part on the sort of farm-yard fairy described as a Hob. He doubtlessly would have been aware of the tradition.

originally posted by Scarbonac
''Fey-like qualities'' such as...? I'm terribly afraid that I'm going to have to ask you to actually back that up with quotes, rather than the very general statements that you've been making.

They are "little people" as opposed to us "big folk"

They also can move very silently and seem to disappear when they don't want us big folk to see them.

The first chapter of the Hobbit does indeed IMO paint a sort of fairy-like picture of them. Though this fairy-like quality also seems to move further into the background after that first chapter of that first book.