It was of silver-steel, which the elves call mithril, and with it went a belt of pearls and crystals.” Mithril: Etymonline claims this was coined in 1954 upon the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring, but it appeared in the first edition of The Hobbit as well: “With that he put on Bilbo a small coat of mail, wrought for some young elf-prince long ago. The list does not explain precisely what a hobbit is. It’s possible he originally came across it (and then filed it away in his memory for later blank-page adventures) in a list of folkloric supernatural creatures in volume 2 of The Denham Tracts (1895), a posthumous collection of writings by Michael Aislabie Denham, an English merchant and collector of folklore. Auden, he wrote that he was grading papers when out of the blue, “On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why.” Hobbit: Tolkien officially coined this word in 1937 with the publication of The Hobbit, but the word was the first thing he thought of and the original inspiration for the novel. In honor of Tolkien’s birthday on January 3, I rounded up this selection of words coined by Tolkien, or words that were otherwise revived or adapted for his works.įind out more fascinating information about the featured image here.

Tolkein trainslation of pearl