Quote:
Originally Posted by Inziladun
As an aside, I have to wonder how hobbits in general were called "halflings" enough to have an aversion to the name. The other races they were normally in contact with, the Men of Bree and the Dúnedain (if Aragorn is typical) use "hobbit". Who else had dealings with them. Dwarves? Who were they to call someone "halfling"?  |
Those whose descendants were to be called hobbits are said to be “first mentioned in the records” in Appendix B in the year 1050 of the Third Age. Their language at the end of the Third Age still contains many words not from the Common Speech related to the speech of the Rohirrim, probably dating to an earlier period when those whose descendants were later to be called hobbits lived in the upper vales of Anduin, neighbours to the ancestors of the Rohirrim. One of these words was
hobbit, related to Rohirric
holbytla ‘hole-builder’ which referred to the same people who now called themselves
hobbbits.
The largest group of Hobbits at the end of the Third Age was in the Shire, Buckland, and Bree-land, but some lived elsewhere in smaller communities. Tolkien notes in the chapter “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”: “There were probably more Outsiders scattered about in the West of the World in those days than the people of the Shire imagined.”
In
The Peoples of Middle-earth, page 311, Tolkien notes that while it was quite likely true that at the end of the Third Age Bree-land was the only place where Men and Hobbits lived together, that in earlier times those who were later called
Hobbits “liked to live with or near to Big Folk of friendly kind, who with their greater strength protected them from many dangers and other hostile Men, and received in exchange many services.”
In short, in the past, the ancestors of those called
Hobbits at the end of the Third Age had many relations with many Men, and the Common Speech name for these people was
banakil ‘halfling’. Presumably other Mannish tongues which spoke of them rendered the name by a translation of the same meaning.
Many different sorts of Men other than Bree-men and Rangers had before the last days of the Third Age had contact with Hobbits. The normal Common Speech name for them was
banakil ‘halfling’ in Gondor and elsewhere and as such they were known in such traditions as were preserved about them. Only in the Shire, Buckland, and Bree-land was the name
Hobbit found.