The Rings of Power: on the river in Tolkien's Second Age of Middle Earth

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by pendell
The Rohirrim have the word "holybytla", which is the closest we have to "hobbit" in any other language.

Holbytla, and it’s not a Rohirrim word, but the author’s translation of the original Rohirrim kûd-dûkan.

Originally Posted by Mechalich
The Vales of Anduin region, where the Hobbits lived prior to their migration westward, abuts the territory of the Rohirrim. The groups were presumably neighbors for some time, during the early portion of Rohan's history, resulting in linguistic exchange.

Not simply linguistic exchange; we’re told that the hobbits had earlier spoken a language that was very close to the language of Rohan.

Originally Posted by Mechalich
The origin of Hobbits is never presented in the legendarium, but logically it falls out of the various experiments in the manipulation of humans by Morgoth and Sauron that also results in werewolves, vampires, and other nasty beings briefly mentioned at points.

This seems as far-fetched as some of the other speculation in this thread, and it’s highly unlikely this is the origin of the proto-hobbits. Morgoth and Sauron don’t create, only warp and twist, and the products of their twistings seem to be invariably evil. Hobbits are not; on balance they seem rather good, and they certainly don’t fit in with phantoms and dreadful beasts, so logically there’s no reason to believe that hobbits were created by Sauron.

Really, it’s hard to imagine grouping hobbits together with vampires, orcs, werewolves and other Morgul-spawn. Probably the simplest explanation within the context of the world is that Yavanna, having seen Aulë create a race of his own, likewise brought forth a small folk who would live quietly and gently upon the land.

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