I ... MAY ... have commented once or twice on the stupid nature of JKR's magic spells, and specifically how linguistically nonsensical they are, but this is one I had not heard! https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1310777365207773190

I can be forgiving of authors who aren't obsessive about linguistics if it's not their focus, but I'm more likely to overlook fudging if it's for a good story. (See: Star Trek's Darmok.) But in the case of these books, it's a symptom of overall laziness https://twitter.com/AmeliaRoseWrite/status/1263291705383546880?s=19

Folks responding to this with "it's fantasy, mate; you're allowed to make shit up" obviously don't know about the spectacular philological gymnastics of one Johnny Tolkien to retroactively justify the word "hobbit" existing in Middle-earth https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1310783739253850113?s=20

Short answer: it does not.

There is no such word as "hobbit" in Middle-earth.

And there was never a hobbit named "Frodo Baggins," either.

When he wrote The Hobbit, it was supposed to be a one-off, comedic adventure For Kids, completely separate from his side project of building a mythos. He used fun neologisms like "hobbit." In the first edition, there are references to things like policemen on bicycles

He did use names from the Edda, an Old Norse book of poems, for the Dwarves, more as an in-joke than anything

His publisher wanted a sequel to The Hobbit and he set about writing one starring Bilbo's cousin Bingo, but somewhere in the middle of Fellowship it was sort of swallowed by his obsessive worldbuilding project and also he fortunately decided that Bingo was a stupid name

So it turned into a saga, but the thing is, his worldbuilding project was very much a linguistic project. Suddenly the slightly haphazard nature of the names in The Hobbit no longer fit, and he had to find some way to explain it

The hobbits spoke Westron, the common language of Men, which is basically rendered as English everywhere in the books. But then that led to the problem of "hobbit" not being, y'know, a "real" English word ...

So Johnny Ronny rummages around his Old English texts to find a word that COULD have credibly turned into "hobbit" with a bit of sound change, and he cobbles together the compound "holbytla," which means "hole-builder." BECAUSE WE CAN'T JUST HAVE SOME NONSENSE WORD, BY GOD

And THAT bit of intensive retroactive etymology led to an entire history of the hobbits hanging out with an offshoot of men in the past, the Men of Rohan, whose language was represented by Old English in the books, so that the hobbits picked up a lot of their words

And ohboy, does this get talked about in the book. I seem to recall Merry, in particular, dorking out over etymology with some Rohirrim. He wrote a goddamn BOOK about it later

But the thing that I absolutely love about all this fussing with English, Old English and Scandinavian words and cross-pollinating, etc., is that it's all supposed to be a translation from another language anyway, so it really shouldn't matter at all. Tolkien was just METICULOUS

He has an entire appendix devoted to this, and how he's "translating" month names (he had to rearrange the calendar because The Hobbit mentioned things like April) and hobbit names for the ease of the reader

"Frodo Baggins" is a "translation" of "Maura Labingi." Maur- means "wise," according to Tolkien, so he went with a Germanic morpheme meaning the same thing, Frod-. Labingi comes from the Westron word laban, which means ... bag.

None of this has the slightest bearing on the story

My point is that you can't appeal to Tolkien if you're going with the "shut up it's fantasy, mate" defense. My other point is that Johnny Tolkien was an obsessive nerd (surprise!), and say what you will about him, but by god he stepped up his research game when it needed stepping

Oh, and the Westron word for "hobbit" is "kuduk," from the "holbytla" equivalent of "Kûd-dûkan," if you were curious

Meanwhile, there's me: https://twitter.com/AmeliaRoseWrite/status/1123366789453246464?s=19