The word ‘hobbit’ was supposedly invented by J. R. R. Tolkien. This fact both is and is not true. To explain why this is the case (or isn’t the case) we must do a bit of delving into the world of witchcraft …

Tolkien’s book was published in 1937, but since the first part of the film has recently come out, the present moment seems like a good time to reflect upon the word that features in the title of Tolkien’s book. So where did it come from? The famous story is that Tolkien, while marking some of his students’ papers in Oxford one day, came to a blank sheet which had not a single word written on it. Out of nowhere – or so it seemed – he had a flash of inspiration, and hastily scribbled down the sentence, ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ That line…