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Hobbit
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=== In English literature === {{further|Tolkien's modern sources}} [[File:Snerg with bow.jpg|thumb|upright=0.6|A Snerg with a bow and arrows. ''[[The Marvellous Land of Snergs]]'' is seen by Tolkien scholars as an influence on Tolkien's hobbits.<ref name="GilliverMarshall2009">{{cite book |last1=Gilliver |first1=Peter |author1-link=Peter Gilliver |last2=Marshall |first2=Jeremy |last3=Weiner |first3=Edmund |title=The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bszM-uwEQOkC&pg=PA54 |date=23 July 2009 |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |isbn=978-0-19-956836-9 |page=54}}</ref> ]] The term "hobbit", however, has real antecedents in modern English. One is a fact that Tolkien admitted: the title of [[Sinclair Lewis]]'s 1922 novel ''[[Babbitt (novel)|Babbitt]]'', about a "complacent American businessman" who goes through a journey of some kind of self-discovery, facing "near-disgrace";<ref>{{ME-ref|Letters|Letter to Harry C. Bauer, 24 November 1966}}</ref> the Tolkien scholar [[Tom Shippey]] observes that there are some parallels here with Bilbo's own journey.{{sfn|Shippey|2005|pp=76-78}} According to a letter from Tolkien to [[W. H. Auden]], one "probably ... unconscious" inspiration was [[Edward Wyke Smith]]'s 1927 children's book ''[[The Marvellous Land of Snergs]]''.<ref group="T">{{harvnb|Carpenter|2023|loc=Letter 163 to W. H. Auden, 7 June 1955 }}</ref> Tolkien described the Snergs as "a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and [who] have the strength of ten men."{{sfn|Carpenter|1978|p=165}} Another possible origin emerged in 1977 when the ''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'' announced that it had found the source that it supposed Tolkien to have used: James Hardy wrote in his 1895 ''[[Denham Tracts|The Denham Tracts, Volume 2]]'': "The whole earth was overrun with ghosts, boggles ... hobbits, hobgoblins." Shippey writes that the list was of ghostly creatures without bodies, nothing like Tolkien's solid flesh-and-blood hobbits.{{sfn|Shippey|2005|pp=76-78}} Tolkien scholars consider it unlikely that Tolkien saw the list.{{sfn|Flowers|2017|pp=2}}
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