antedating "hobbit"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Thanks, Stephen.

My guess it that it was a very local or nonce name for a hobgoblin. GB
reals no further pre-Tolkien exx.

JL

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Stephen Goranson <goranson at duke.edu> wrote:

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> Subject:      Re: antedating "hobbit"
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> Jonathan Lighter [wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM]
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> Subject: [ADS-L] antedating "hobbit"
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> This ex. was noticed by the English folklorist Katherine Briggs in the '70s
> ... but hasn't yet made it to OED:
>
> 1846-1859 M. A. Denham _The Denham Tracts_   II (London: David
> Nutt/Folklore Society, 1895) 79: Seventy or eighty years ago...the whole
> earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles, ...brownies, black dogs,
> bugbears, shellycoats, ...fire-drakes,...melch-dicks, ...swarths, freits,
> ...hobbits, hobgoblins,...leprechauns, [etc.] that there was not a village
> in England that had not its own peculiar ghost.
>
> Denham's list goes on for several pages.  Either Denham or more likely his
> editor, J. Hardy,  refers the reader further  to the   "Lit. Gaz. for
> December 1848, p. 849."  I have had no success in locating this, nor do I
> know how relevant it is to "hobbit."
>
> JL
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
> ***
> The Literary Gazette of Dec. 23, 1848, p.849 col. 2 has a long list of
> ghosts or spirits, but I don't see hobbits there.
>
> Stephen Goranson
> www.duke.edu/~goranson
>
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